The Organization of Wrongdoing: The Strategic Role of Leadership

Abstract

Research on organizational wrongdoing has largely explained the persistence of illegal or unethical practices through processes of normalization, whereby wrongdoing gradually becomes accepted as routine and legitimate within organizations. While this perspective has generated important insights, it pays less attention to the role of leadership in sustaining wrongdoing when organizational members continue to recognize its illegal or unethical nature. Drawing on the literature on organizational silence, this article argues that wrongdoing may persist not only because it is normalized, but also because leaders actively suppress dissent. The article develops this argument through the analysis of two case studies: the Theranos fraud and the Australian high-performance swimming scandal. Drawing on data collected from multiple sources, the analysis identifies two complementary types of leadership strategies for creating and sustaining organizational silence. First, leaders directly discourage voice by exerting pressure on individuals either through intimidation, degradation and retaliation or rationalization. Second, they indirectly maintain silence by designing organizational structures and processes that fragment information, restrict communication, and weaken monitoring systems. By integrating insights from the literature on organizational wrongdoing and organizational silence, the article contributes to research on the persistence of wrongdoing by showing that its continuation depends not only on processes of normalization but also on leaders’ strategic efforts to suppress voice, suggesting that organizational silence should be understood as a mechanism that is conceptually distinct from, yet complementary to, the normalization of wrongdoing.