Middle Managers and Corruptive Routine Translation: The Social Production of Deceptive Performance

Abstract

Our study offers an understanding of how middle managers may use routines as tools to induce their subordinates to engage in widespread unethical behavior. We conducted a 15-month ethnography at a desk sales unit within a large telecommunications firm and discovered that middle managers coerced their subordinates into deceiving upper management about the unit’s performance. Based upon our findings and relying on the routine dynamics literature, we propose that middle managers engaged in a process that we label “corruptive routine translation.” It involves the translation by middle managers of upper management’s more abstract and higher level performance routine into a corrupted, lower level version of that routine that is enacted by frontline employees. In corruptive routine translation, middle managers respond to performance obstacles by identifying and exploiting structural vulnerabilities to generate and conceal deceptive performance. We also illustrate how routines are interdependent across levels within an organization’s hierarchy, implicating upper management, middle management, and lower level employees in the collective phenomenon that is the social production of deceit. Our model contributes to the routines dynamics literature as well as to the literature on ethics at work by highlighting the corruptive routine translation process through which middle managers use routines as tools to induce deceptive performance in their subordinates.

The Unfolding of Control Mechanisms inside Organizations: Pathways of Customization and Transmutation

“…Organizational controls can also have unexpected negative consequences, such as “fermenting hostility” toward management, even if they achieve the organization’s desired outcomes, such as increasing output (Ezzamel and Willmott, 1998). Given these negative effects, it is perhaps not surprising that the imposition and enforcement of organizational control mechanisms is often met with employee resistance (Gill, 2019) in forms that include employees changing the way they work (Roy, 1952; Bernstein, 2012), gaming the system (Burawoy, 1979), or engaging in covert actions (den Nieuwenboer, da Cunha, and Treviño, 2017). Anteby and Chan (2018) found that TSA workers responded to surveillance from management by adopting invisibility practices, which made it harder for supervisors to use their existing surveillance controls to monitor the workers.…”

“…Anteby and Chan (2018) found that TSA workers responded to surveillance from management by adopting invisibility practices, which made it harder for supervisors to use their existing surveillance controls to monitor the workers. Workers may also use passive resistance tactics, such as shifting their attention away from work activities to focus their attention on personal pursuits (Stanko and Beckman, 2015), or they may adopt unethical and deceptive behavior, such as falsifying records to show their performance met aggressive output targets (den Nieuwenboer, da Cunha, and Treviño, 2017).…”

Fraud and Innovation

“…The ubiquity of fraudulent corporate conduct belies the paucity of literature on the subject in organization theory. A small group of organizational scholars has directly studied fraud, and there is significant interest in the general subject of organizational misconduct (Jonsson, Greve, and Fujiwara-Greve, 2009; Sharkey, 2014; Aven, 2015; den Nieuwenboer, da Cunha, and Treviño, 2017). Still, there is scant empirical work on fraud, especially in large samples (exceptions include Pierce and Snyder, 2008; Yenkey, 2015, 2018).…”

The study of behavioral ethics within organizations: A special issue introduction

“…The field would also benefit from additional use of qualitative research methods, which have a unique capacity to identify processes and concepts not easily exposed in quantitative approaches. For example, den Nieuwenboer, Vieira da Cunha, and Treviño () found that unachievable goals set by top management created pressure that motivated middle managers to use routines to induce their employees to engage in unethical behavior. Their ethnographic approach surfaced cross‐level processes that would otherwise remain hidden.…”