Tag Archives: Adam Fine

The Behavioral Code: Four Behavioral Science Insights for Compliance and Enforcement

by Benjamin van Rooij and Adam Fine

With each new corporate scandal and case of major illegal corporate behavior or wrongdoing, regulators and prosecutors will face tougher questions about why they have not been able to prevent damages. Increasingly, this will mean that compliance and regulatory enforcement become an ex-ante affair, where corporate managers and government officials seek to influence behavior before damage happens, rather than the ex-post model of assigning liability after the fact or defending the corporation against such liability.

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Detoxing Corporate Culture: How To Assess Toxic Cultural Elements

by Benjamin van Rooij, Adam Fine, and Judy van der Graaf

All views here represent the authors’ own views and not their organizations.

There is a cultural moment in the world of corporate compliance. Following recent major corporate scandals, there is now growing recognition among corporate boards and beyond  that truly changing corporate misconduct means addressing the toxic elements within cultures.

The central question for companies and regulators is how to assess toxic cultural elements.

Toxic corporate culture exists when organizations, whose chief business and business means are legal, develop structural violations of rules over a period of time.

Our recent paper (PDF: 1.06 MB), published in Administrative Science,  offers an in-depth analysis of what toxic cultural elements played a role in three major corporate scandals: BP’s polluting and unsafe oil exploration practices, VW’s diesel emission cheating practices, and Wells Fargo’s fake and unauthorized accounts schemes. In all three cases, the illegal behavior spanned over a decade and investigators concluded that corporate culture was to blame. Yet in all three cases, no one had yet systematically sought to understand what toxic cultural elements sustained the illegal conduct. We developed an analytical framework to examine toxicity in organizational cultures on three levels: structures, values, and practices (see Table 1 below[1]). Continue reading

How to Punish a Corporation: Insights from Social and Behavioral Science

by Benjamin van Rooij and Adam Fine

“Justice cannot mean a prison sentence for a teenager who steals a car, but nothing more than a sideways glance at a C.E.O. who quietly engineers the theft of billions of dollars,” wrote U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren in a New York Times op-ed. When she calls for stronger action against corporate crime, she’s not alone. Calls resound, particularly on the political left. In 2015, the Department of Justice, under then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Q. Yates, issued a new policy (PDF: 448.14 KB) prioritizing prosecuting corporate criminals.

Punishing corporate executives more strongly may be justified. Punishment rarely occurs, and, when it does, it is often too weak to constitute “justice.” But once we agree that more punishment is warranted, the next question is how we can make punishment more effective in preventing corporate crime? Continue reading