Organization Studies
Eberl, P./Geiger, D./Aßländer, M.: “Repairing Trust in an Organization after Integrity Violations: The Ambivalence of Organizational Rule Adjustments”, in: Organization Studies, Vol. 36 No. 9, 2015, p. 1205-1235.
Abstract: In this paper, we investigate the repair of trust after integrity violations at the organizational level by examining the influence of organizational rules. We reconstruct the prominent corruption case of Siemens AG, which has faced the greatest bribery scandal in the history of German business. Our findings suggest that focusing on organizational rules and their subsequent refinement is an appropriate signal of trustworthiness to show external stakeholders the organizations’ serious intention to prevent the causes of integrity violations in the future. However, such rule adjustments might have negative consequences for organizational members as internal stakeholders. We argue that these different impacts of organizational rules are due to their paradoxical nature. To deal with this problem we suggest an effective interplay between formal rules and informal.
Organization Studies (OS) is a multidisciplinary journal with global reach, rooted in the social sciences, inspired by diversity, comparative in outlook and open to paradigmatic plurality. It is recognized as one of the world's highest impact management journals through inclusion in the Financial Times' list of leading journals.
The full paper can be found here.