Middle Managers and Corruptive Routine Translation: The Social Production of Deceptive Performance

Abstract

Our study offers an understanding of how middle managers may use routines as tools to induce their subordinates to engage in widespread unethical behavior. We conducted a 15-month ethnography at a desk sales unit within a large telecommunications firm and discovered that middle managers coerced their subordinates into deceiving upper management about the unit’s performance. Based upon our findings and relying on the routine dynamics literature, we propose that middle managers engaged in a process that we label “corruptive routine translation.” It involves the translation by middle managers of upper management’s more abstract and higher level performance routine into a corrupted, lower level version of that routine that is enacted by frontline employees. In corruptive routine translation, middle managers respond to performance obstacles by identifying and exploiting structural vulnerabilities to generate and conceal deceptive performance. We also illustrate how routines are interdependent across levels wit...