Who bears the brunt? A review and research agenda for the consequences of organizational wrongdoing for individuals.
Jo-Ellen Pozner
Jo-Ellen Pozner, Jared D. Harris
The subject of corporate misconduct has become a topic of particular interest for scholars in accounting, finance, and organizational studies. Corporate misconduct is broadly defined as “the organizational pursuit of any action considered illegitimate from an ethical, regulatory, or legal standpoint” (Harris and Bromiley 2007: 351). Scholars have investigated the antecedents of misconduct (e.g., Pierce and Larkin, this volume; Palmer and Moore, this volume; Ashforth and Lange, this volume), and to a lesser degree, its immediate consequences for guilty organizations and other firms to which they are linked (e.g., Greve, chapter 13). Significant gaps in this literature are still ripe for exploration, particularly as concerns the longer-lasting effects that organizational wrongdoing can have on individuals employed by those organizations, to whom consequences might adhere, and the consequences of illegitimate behavior for employees below the level of the top management team. That is, although scholars have demonstrated that revelations of financial misconduct lead to immediate consequences for organizational elites, we have scant theory explaining the mechanisms through which the taint of fraud is transferred from organizations to individuals – especially the non-elite – or what the lasting impact for any of those individuals might be."
