The study consists of 2 experiments. The University of Amsterdam’s CREED lab conducted 1 of the experiments, and the other was run online with participants from the United States.

Surveys show that employee collusion is a significant and growing problem. Collusion can take on many forms, from joint efforts to change organizational policies to outright fraud. Increasing organisational transparency is often proposed as a way to reduce corruption and fraud.

‘Partners in crime’

In their paper Finding partners in crime? How transparency about managers’ behavior affects employee collusion, Maas and his co-author find that internal transparency affects collusion in 2 ways. First, transparency reveals how well managers treat their employees. This is important because employees who are treated less well are singled out by their co-workers as potential ‘partners in crime.’ Second, increasing transparency gives managers an incentive to treat employees better. This is important because employees who are treated better are less likely to collude.

The researchers thus show that transparency can be a double-edged sword: the more employees know about what is going on elsewhere in the organisation, the better they will be able to identify colleagues who might be interested in joining an ill-intended partnership. However, managers in more transparent organisations realise they cannot easily get away with bad behaviour. They therefore tend to treat their employees better. This reduces the probability that these employees will initiate or join a collusive effort.

Publication

Finding partners in crime? How transparency about managers’ behavior affects employee collusion, Victor S. Maas, Huaxiang Yin, Accounting, Organizations and Society, Volume 96, January 2022, 101293.