Abstract
Drawing on collective myopia as a lens, we explore the infamous Airbus bribery scandal to show how the executives of the global aircraft manufacturer, through their actions and behaviours, institutionalised the payment of bribes to secure contracts. Data for the inquiry consist of publicly available court-approved documents, company website and internal emails, and newspaper articles on the scandal. Unpacking the bribery scheme operated by Airbus, we found that bribing of foreign government officials and airline executives to secure contracts was part and parcel of the firm's organising strategy. In this regard, the organising practices of Airbus actively encouraged employees to break its own bribery compliance policies which they employed as smokescreens to cover their illegal activities. Building on our findings, we developed a collective myopic-bribery framework outlining how the collective myopia in organising drove the bribery activities at Airbus. The implications of the findings for theory and practice are outlined.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 654-670 |
Number of pages | 17 |
Journal | European Management Review |
Volume | 19 |
Issue number | 4 |
Early online date | 2 Mar 2022 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 1 Dec 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Copyright © 2022 The Authors. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ , which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Keywords
- Airbus
- bribery
- collective myopia
- organising practices
- scandals