Procedural corruption strategies in public service

Abstract

The Opportunity-Motivation-Justification model explaining the organizational corruption antecedents conceptualizes procedural corruption as the abuse of legal-rational authority based on formal rules. Yet, the link between the procedural offences and public service remains underexplored, despite severe damages to equal access to market, competition and government legitimacy that corrupt transactions between business managers and public officials might cause. This paper uses a multiple case study strategy to investigate critical incidents of bribery of the public officials in return for business as procedural outcomes. Insights into explanations regarding the legal-rational authority abuse by managers that intend to corrupt the public officials is obtained from the cases of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) violations formalized from 2013 to 2017. The data includes the US Securities and Exchange Commission proceedings, US Department of Justice communications, and corporate press releases regarding five North American and five European firms publicly traded on the US Stock Exchange. The findings suggest that the business managers may engage in different procedural corruption strategies, depending on the extent to which they interact with formal rules as the base of their legal-rational authority. The four proposed procedural corruption strategies include ignoring, minimizing, denigrating, and constructing.