In the wake of accounting giant PwC's tax leaks, the Robodebt scandal and the banking royal commission, it's become evident that Australia is prone to work-related scandals.
What's less clear is exactly what encourages people to make unethical decisions in the workplace.
One motivating factor can be stress, according to Macquarie University work ethics researcher Dale Tweedie.
Dr Tweedie says when people are under stress, they are more prone to getting "tunnel vision", meaning they're less likely to reflect on their immediate actions — something that acting ethically requires.
"They tend to focus more on immediate problems, immediate incentives, the project deadline, the performance metric, they're trying to meet those kinds of things," Dr Tweedie tells ABC RN's This Working Life.
He says it's a situation that's becoming more common "as we put more pressure on people in the workplace, [and] as we get tighter deadlines and higher expectations".
That's why it's more important than ever to understand how unethical behaviour thrives — and how to stamp it out.
Wrongdoers rely on the complicit
Harvard Business School professor Max Bazerman has written extensively about the connection between unethical work environments and complicity, which he defines as being involved with others in illegal or unethical activity.
That can include simply remaining silent in the face of such behaviour.
"Instead of trying to prevent the very unusual core wrongdoer, if we could train the next generation to not be complicit, we could go a long way toward eliminating these kinds of scandals in the future," he says.
Professor Bazerman has been fascinated with work-related scandals, from Purdue Pharma's opioid lawsuit to disgraced Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes.
He's particularly interested in how such scandals could be prevented from happening again.
"I don't think I know how to stop truly bad people from engaging in truly bad behaviour," he says.
Professor Bazerman says there are certain behavioural profiles connected with complicity in wrongdoing.
They include a collaborator who goes along with other people's grand plans unquestioningly, or "true partners", those who knowingly engage in unethical behaviour, no matter the cost.
"Moral disengagement" is another common factor in unethical behaviour, explains ethical business growth strategist Sue Barrett.
"That describes the process of convincing the self that ethical standards don't apply to oneself in a particular context," she says.
"In layman's terms, it basically means an 'anything goes' culture — as long as it makes me money and gives me power and influence, to hell with the consequences for anyone else."
Guilty of too much trust
Professor Bazerman has first hand experience of unethical behaviour. He walked blinding into problematic territory while co-authoring a research paper in 2012.
"I was about 85 per cent done with [the paper] when a group called Data Colada — who have an amazing blog that oversees social science and the wrongdoing that sometimes occurs — basically notified all five authors … [that] our data was fraudulent," Professor Bazerman says.
"I didn't engage in fraud, but I am complicit because I basically trusted others.
"And I didn't spend enough time looking at the data to keep this event from occurring."
Professor Bazerman says he was "guilty of ... putting trust in others" while doing "too little" verifying.
He says misguided trust is often behind unethical workplace behaviour.
"For example, one that's relevant in the Australian story with PwC is the whole issue of auditor independence. For the last 20 years, I've been arguing that auditors should only audit, they shouldn't be allowed to sell consulting services.
"The whole idea here is to create auditors who actually want to find anything wrong with the client, rather than to please the client, which is the system we currently have both in [the US and Australia] … We allow auditors to sell consulting services."
Ms Barrett says a significant challenge in stamping out unethical behaviour in workplaces is that people are less likely to speak up when their work environment isn't safe, and when they don't have job security.
"What ends up happening is that you have people, when they see bad things happen, they might go, 'That's bad. I don't like it. But what if I speak up, and something happens to me?'"
Dr Tweedie says, over the past two decades, he's witnessed a trend of less secure, more precarious employment conditions in organisations, universities and the public service.
It's a culture he wants to see shifting.
"We need people to have the confidence to be able to raise issues that are in the public interest," he says.
"Ensuring those underlying conditions that give people confidence to speak out, and know that they have protection in doing so, are equally important."
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