Organizational Integrity And Corruption Decision-Making In The Ghanaian Public Service

ABSTRACT

Global effort to fight corruption has become more intense because it is considered one of the most complex societal problems. Corruption in Ghana’s public service poses a significant risk to service delivery and national development. The upsurge and deeply rooted nature of corruption in the public service have been attributed to the breakdown of organizational integrity in these institutions. Corruption research in the public service is subsumed mainly under rationalistic assumptions and approached from the premise that corruption is a self-serving behavior of public service workers, therefore organizational integrity management is overly focused on enforcing formal norms. This study argued that the decision to engage in or refute corrupt activities is not solely premised on self-serving rationalistic behavior, but also guided by a multiplicity of complex informal organizational norms. Unfortunately, attention is rarely paid to the role of informal organizational norms in public servants’ corruption decision-making. Using qualitative vignettes, this study was designed to explore how public service workers (PSWs) experience and navigate context-specific formal and informal organizational norms in corruption decision making. Three focus group discussions with 22 public service Directors and semi-structured individual interviews with 26 public service Administrative and Technical staff were conducted. Additionally, 8 individual interviews with anti-corruption activists and retired public service workers were integrated with a document review of grey literature to corroborate findings. Formal and informal organizational norms that influenced organizational integrity and PSWs decision-making included rigid bureaucracy, opportunistic staffing, political praise-singing, apathy towards work, and reciprocal appreciation. Informal organizational norms equally influenced PSWs corruption-decision-making as did the formal norms. However, in the vignette scenarios where the perception of the severity of formal sanctions was under-rated, informal organizational norms displaced formal organizational norms, clouded the organizational interest, putting to the fore the interest of the individual and the corrupt partner. An additional noteworthy finding was that context-specific risk preferences were employed by PSWs as heuristics to navigate corruption in the public service.

The findings imply that ensuring compliance with formal organizational norms and regulations is

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necessary but insufficient to effectively prevent corruption in the Ghanaian public service. To effectively manage organizational integrity to mitigate corruption, there is a need for administrative and structural changes, as well as organizational and social unlearning of dysfunctional formal and informal organizational norms.

Keywords: Ghana, organizational integrity, public service integrity, corruption decision-making, corruption norms.