Based on research by Muñoz, A., Pascual-Egido, F., Córdoba-Cely, J., & Greenwood, R. (2023)
Everyone loves competition—until it becomes toxic. Muñoz and colleagues show how ambitious corporate cultures quietly convert ordinary employees into rule-breakers “for the good of the company.” Scandals don’t start with villains. They start with teams under pressure, goals that feel non-negotiable, and leaders who look away.
Key Points
• Competitive cultures create psychological pressure that normalizes unethical pro-organizational behavior.• Employees justify misconduct as “helping the team win.”
• Leaders and peers jointly shape ethical boundaries through formal and informal signals.
• Reward systems that glorify results amplify misconduct.
• Ethics cannot be “policed”—they must be socially embedded.
Why This Matters
The central implication is unsettling: unethical behavior is rarely the product of bad people—it is the result of clarity around performance and ambiguity around ethics. When earnings calls, dashboards, and bonuses dominate managerial conversation, employees begin to equate morality with scoreboard outcomes.
You’ve seen this in the real world. Consider Uber’s early “growth at all costs” era. Surge manipulation, data scraping, and competitor sabotage weren’t accidental. They emerged from an environment that defined success as market conquest and treated ethical concerns as operational friction. The behavior was not individual deviance; it was cultural expression.
Contrast that with Patagonia. The company competes fiercely on product innovation and supply-chain excellence, but its leaders codify ethical boundaries through public commitments and transparent consequences. Competition is contextualized: win the right way or don’t win at all. The difference isn’t the talent; it’s the culture.
For managers, the key insight is to design competitive systems that include a moral floor.
This means:
• Aligning KPIs with values, not just volume.
• Rewarding ethical decision-making with the same seriousness as revenue results.
• Encouraging employees to escalate conflicts without fear of retaliation.
• Making explicit statements of disapproval toward shortcuts—even when they “work.”
Decentralized teams and remote work intensify the stakes. Without daily micro-signals of integrity, employees rely on peers and metrics for direction. Leaders who ignore culture don’t create ethical neutrality—they create informal authority structures that reward survival tactics over principled judgment.
Based upon the Analysis Of: Muñoz, A., Pascual-Egido, F., Córdoba-Cely, J., & Greenwood, R. (2023). How a competitive corporate culture influences unethical pro-organizational behavior: An analytical framework. Human Relations, 1–29.
