Supervisors: Panagiotis Mitkidis & Stefan Pfattheicher
Discussants: Polymeros Chrysochou & Mirja Hubert

Abstract
Human cooperation drives complex organizational life, but major corporate scandals like Enron, Volkswagen and Theranos illustrate how collaboration can foster large-scale corruption. Research on collaborative corruption typically examines anonymized dyadic interactions with minimal collaboration, limiting insights into the group dynamics of corrupt collaborations. Moreover, while psychological mechanisms – such as diffusion and displacement of responsibility – are suggested to drive collaborative corruption, these are rarely measured directly, and the circumstances that activate each mechanism remain underexplored. 

This dissertation addresses these gaps by examining corrupt collaborations in richer collaborative settings, identifying the social psychological mechanisms involved and exploring the conditions that trigger them. 

In this presentation, I focus on two of my dissertation papers. The first paper introduces a novel theoretical framework categorizing corrupt collaborations based on goal orientation (individual vs. collective) and coordination levels, highlighting conditions likely to activate specific mechanisms such as diffusion of responsibility. The second paper builds on this by exploring how organizational decision structures (flat vs. hierarchical) influence responsibility attribution and corruption. Across three experiments, we find that diffusion of responsibility is prevalent across structures, but hierarchical settings – where responsibility can be displaced to specific members – are particularly susceptible to corruption. These findings emphasize the role of organizational design in shaping unethical behavior.

Everyone is welcome!