Corruption: Getting to the Root of the Problem

Organisations: Train Your Employees to Detect Corruption Attempts!

When you think of corruption, you probably picture suitcases full of cash, corrupt heads of state, or unscrupulous agents in the pay of lobby groups. In reality, corruption often takes the mundane form of an overpriced restaurant, a business trip, or a referral for a relative — practices that are extremely widespread in professional settings. These situations are so common that we sometimes give in... without even realising it.

Faced with this reality, organisations have a real role to play. While anti-corruption legislation (such as the UK Bribery Act or equivalent national laws) may require companies to train their most exposed employees, our training goes beyond regulatory and legal compliance, genuinely teaching employees to detect corruption attempts in everyday work situations — to make a real difference.

Everyday Corruption Operates in Disguise

Imagine the following scenario: after a pitch for a contract, a sales representative from a candidate company invites the evaluator to a Michelin-starred restaurant.

Is this corruption? Take a few minutes to think. How would you answer? Probably "not necessarily" — as most of our learners do, just like the employees who accept invitations to expensive restaurants. Yet the sales representative is offering something of value that implicitly encourages the evaluator to show favouritism.

From the invited person's perspective, this short-term gain doesn't seem to carry a moral cost: the supplier isn't explicitly asking for anything in return, a good meal "doesn't hurt anyone", and it can seem like a common practice in a negotiation context. In these circumstances, the person being courted is likely to accept. The seemingly harmless nature of the gift hasn't triggered any vigilance.

The defining characteristic of everyday corruption is that it is invisible. The person being targeted doesn't detect the moral dilemma they're facing. They give in, in good faith, to whatever is being offered. Their knowledge of the law won't help them — because they won't connect it to the complex situation they're in.

It is therefore important to train employees to recognise the warning signs when faced with such an offer: what is the nature of their relationship with the person making the attempt? Is the invitation of reasonable value? For these reflexes to become automatic, training must prioritise plausible, varied, and difficult-to-analyse scenarios that employees are likely to encounter in their working lives.

This Insight Was the Starting Point for Our "Preventing Corruption" Training.

Working alongside ethics professionals and legal experts, we first identified the configurations in which employees are most likely to give in. We then adjusted these to vary the level of difficulty, offering learners a pathway of increasing complexity.

We placed particular emphasis on corruption scenarios that exploit what we find most pleasurable. For example, we have a strong tendency to favour members of our own social group (family, friends, etc.) at the expense of those outside it (Mullen, 1992). Imagine the same characters as before, but this time the agent mentions in passing that their son is looking for a company for an apprenticeship. The sales representative offers to pass the CV to the relevant department. This reward is a significant advantage for the son — and the evaluator is unlikely to see it as a red flag, forgetting that they are still in a negotiation.

To reduce the likelihood that employees will give in to such offers, it is therefore important to specifically address these points: benefits that could advantage those close to us, as well as luxury gifts that appeal to our desire for social approval (prestigious business trips, premium champagne). Presenting these explicitly to employees will help them better understand the moral cost such gifts entail — making them more likely to decline and report the approach to their compliance officer or manager.

A Solution: Centre Your Anti-Corruption Training on These Warning Signs

To effectively reduce the likelihood that your employees will fall victim to corruption, our training:

• raises awareness of the signals that should trigger vigilance: the nature of the relationship with the person making the attempt, the scale of the reward offered, the context, etc.
• specifically focuses on the rewards to which we are naturally more susceptible and which give us particular pleasure.

As with every Didask training, learners are placed directly in a scenario and must choose between different options. This requires cognitive effort, which promotes long-term retention of the concepts being taught and the ability to apply them appropriately in real situations (see our article on pedagogical effectiveness). A further equally important point is that this methodology teaches employees to extract knowledge and adapt it to new contexts. Since the range of possible corruption scenarios is potentially limitless, it is far more effective to develop genuine critical thinking skills on these topics — skills that will help employees detect warning signs directly in context.

REFERENCES

Hamlin JK. The origins of human morality: Complex socio-moral evaluations by preverbal infants. In: Decety J, Christen Y, editors. New Frontiers in Social Neuroscience. New York, NY: Springer; 2014. pp. 165–188
Mullen, B., Brown, R., & Smith, C. (1992). Ingroup bias as a function of salience, relevance, and status: An integration. European Journal of Social Psychology, 22(2), 103-122