Compliance and Organizations – How Can Organizations Enable Compliance?

Abstract

The importance of compliance for companies is obvious, as compliance violations can have far-reaching consequences. Numerous scandal reports in press testify the general interest of society in compliance. The question arises, how companies can promote compliance in organizations. Up to now, too little attention seems to be paid to a current and comprehensive overview of compliance drivers in organizations. This gap is addressed by providing a systematic literature review (SLR) on factors that enable compliance within an organization. The 7-S framework of organizations, developed by Waterman et al. (1980) responds to the problem of multiplicity of factors that also need to be considered when implementing compliance in organizations and was therefore used as the theoretical underpinning of this paper. The results of this SLR show, that there are already various starting points for “hard” and “soft” organizational success factors of compliance in the individual areas of an organization. Especially “soft” organizational factors, such as culture, staff and organizational skills seem to be important for long term success in compliance. This paper is not only relevant for compliance officers and compliance responsible persons, but also for compliance researchers, as several limitations demonstrate the need for further qualitative and quantitative research.