CEO Wrongdoing: A Review of Pressure, Opportunity, and Rationalization

Wrongdoing, and specifically that which is committed by top executives, has attracted scholars for decades for a number of reasons. Among them, the consequences of wrongdoing are widespread for organizations and the people in and around them. Due to the vast array of consequences, there continues to be new questions and additional scholarly attempts to uncover why it occurs. In this review, we build upon previous efforts to synthesize the body of literature regarding the antecedents of CEO wrongdoing utilizing a framework that sheds light on the status of the literature and where unanswered questions remain. We apply the Fraud Triangle, a framework drawn from the accounting literature, to derive conclusions about what we know about the pressures faced by CEOs, the opportunities afforded to CEOs to commit wrongdoing, and contributing factors to a CEO's ability to rationalize misbehavior. We organize the literature on these conceptual antecedents of CEO wrongdoing around internal (e.g., compensation structure and organizational culture) and external (e.g., shareholder pressure and social aspirations) forces. In doing so, we integrate findings from a variety of disciplines (i.e., accounting, finance, and sociology) but remain focused on management scholarship since the last review of organizational wrongdoing to provide an updated state of the literature. This review offers a clear framework and a common language;it highlights gaps in the literature and specific directions for future research with the ultimate goal of understanding why CEOs engage in wrongdoing

Examining multi-level effects on corporate social responsibility and irresponsibility

What influences firms to engage in socially responsible (irresponsible) activities? Corporate social responsibility (CSR), the efforts of firms to create a positive and desirable impact on society, and corporate social irresponsibility (CSI), contrary actions of unethical behavior that negatively influence society, have become an important focus of discussion for both corporations and scholars. Despite this interest, our understanding of organizations’ socially responsible (irresponsible) actions and their antecedents is still developing. A dearth of knowledge about the multi-level nature of the drivers of CSR and CSI continues to exist. Utilizing a longitudinal sample composed of 899 firms in 66 industries, we follow a prominent model to empirically examine industry-, firm-, and individual-level effects on CSR and CSI. Employing variance decomposition analysis, our results confirm that all three levels of investigation do indeed influence CSR and CSI. More substantively, our analysis estimates the magnitude of the effects attributable to each of the three levels for both CSR and CSI. We also compare multi-level influences on two separate CSR strategies, those targeting primary stakeholders (strategic CSR) and those targeting secondary stakeholders (social CSR). We find greater industry- and firmlevel effects on social CSR, and higher individual-level effects on strategic CSR. Our results build on the conceptual work of previous authors by providing empirical analyses to confirm multilevel influences on CSR and extending prior multi-level theory to the concept of CSI. Further, we add to the emerging literature regarding stakeholder demands by examining the various influences on CSR strategies targeting different stakeholder groups