A study of organisational change and corruption

The link between organisational change and corruption has been largely neglected in the literature, despite myriad studies conducted by researchers in many different fields on both phenomena. To fill the gap, this study provides empirical evidence about the interplay between organisational change and corruption. Case study is employed as a research strategy. The organisational change initiative being studied is the reformation or modernisation of a tax authority. The empirical data include 21 interviews, 21 drawings (from two focus groups), and 10 photographs. Thematic analysis was employed to analyse the interviews and visual data. The main finding of this study is that there is interplay between organisational change and corruption, in which change does not only affect corruption, but also that corruption affects organisational change. On one side of the interplay, this study shows that instead of inducing corruption (as suggested in the literature), organisational change can reduce corruption. In addition to literal accounts, metaphors have been used to show that organisational change has reduced the space for corruption, changed employees' involvement in corruption, and shifted the nature of corruption from systemic to individual. However, this finding cannot be separated from the context, i.e., the pre-existed corruption prior to change. This overlooked context explains why the findings of this study are different to the previous studies’. On the other side of the interplay, which has been unexplored, this study contributes by showing that corruption, both pre- and post-change, can affect organisational change (and employees' emotions) positively and negatively. Pre-change corruption can trigger employees' willingness to change. The factors that influence these positive reactions are dissonant feelings, spiritual awareness, and employees’ involuntary involvement in past corruption. The finding also shows that post-change corruption triggers employees’ negative emotions in the form of collective shame, hurt, and injured pride. The use of visual methods in this study has provided an alternative way to study organisational change and, in particular, corruption, which has hitherto been dominated by quantitative methods. It is found that different forms of information are provided by the interviews and visual data. Drawings provide more negative accounts. Perhaps this demonstrates the potential ability of the drawing technique in unveiling such accounts. Other findings show that drawings produced different types of metaphors than those from the interviews. However, as suggested in this study, the use of metaphors is strongly related to context. This finding reinforces the finding mentioned earlier about the important role of context in the study of organisational change management.