Nekovee, Maziar and Pinto, Jonathan (2019) Modelling the impact of organizationan structure and whistle blowers on intra-organizational corruption contagion. Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 522. pp. 339-349. ISSN 0378-4371

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Abstract

We complement the rich conceptual work on organizational corruption by quantitatively modeling the spread of corruption within organizations. We systematically vary four organizational culture-related parameters, i.e., organization structure, location of bad apples, employees’ propensity to become corrupted (“corruption probability”), and number of whistle-blowers. Our simulation studies find that in organizations with flatter structures, corruption permeates the organization at a lower threshold value of corruption probability compared to those with taller structures. However, the final proportion of corrupted individuals is higher in the latter as compared to the former. Also, we find that for a 1,000-strong organization, 5% of the workforce is a critical threshold in terms of the number of whistle-blowers needed to constrain the spread of corruption, and if this number is around 25%, the corruption contagion is negligible. Implications of our results are discussed.

Item Type:	Article
Keywords:	corruption, mathematical models, organizational structure, social contagion, complex networks
Schools and Departments:	School of Engineering and Informatics > Engineering and Design
Depositing User:	Maziar Nekovee
Date Deposited:	19 Feb 2019 15:56
Last Modified:	01 Feb 2020 02:00
URI:	http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/72358

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