Ethics in Organizational Network Performance: Lessons from Organized Crime and Organizational Wrongdoing

This chapter builds the argument for the need of evaluating the performance of organizational networks from a business ethics perspective. Network performance is normally analyzed in terms of coordination and outcomes, two byproducts of network structure and governance, and not in terms of whether its content is ethical or not. But in a time when wrongdoing and unethical decision-making are more and more diffused in organizational networks and bring along very negative outputs such as costly scandals for companies and societies, embracing an ethical perspective on the evaluation of network performance may advance our knowledge on the nuanced phenomenology of network dysfunctionalities. This chapter builds its argument by bridging the two disconnected literatures of network performance and organizational unethical behavior. It starts examining how network studies have treated performance without including the ethical dimension in the picture. Then, it moves to organizational wrongdoing and discusses how unethical behavior is still theorized as a single-organization phenomenon. Third, it shows the implications of, respectively, the absence of ethical evaluations of network performance and of a networked view of wrongdoing. Finally, it paves the way (1) to future research on network studies, by addressing the role and impact of embracing ethical considerations in studying network dysfunctionalities and (2) to wrongdoing analyses by setting the basis to address wrongdoing in organizational networks.