Introduction Over the years, numerous cases of corruption have been described in the media with increasing public outrage and condemnation. Thus, defined as a “deviant behaviour that manifests itself in an abuse of a function in favour of another person or institution” (Rabl, Kühlmann, 2008), corruption is often described by observers and academics as “sand-in-the-wheel” in the economic system (Kaufmann, Wei 1999) or a “disease” (Nielsen, 2003). The condemnations of corruption could be due to its serious economic, social, political and moral consequences (Argandoña, 2007). Indeed, in terms of financial consequences, the European Union estimated the annual cost of corruption for the EU to lie between € 179 and €990 billion (EPRS, 2016). Facing …show more content…
The national control system is the bureaucratic system that monitors any economic activity, in particular the one in charge of the fight against corruption in a specific economic sector. An example of a national control organization could be a public agency in charge of monitoring the activities of firms in a specific industry in a country. National control mechanisms are the methods by which social agents can encourage compliance at country level. Based on the work of Simons (1987, 1994, 1997), we define it as the formal and informal information-based routines and procedures used by governments to maintain or alter patterns in public and private organizational activities to reduce …show more content…
Considering that role is the set of prescriptions defining what the behaviour of a position member should be (Biddle, Thomas, 1966), role ambiguity refers to the ambiguity regarding the expectations of the individuals within the organization and / or the expectations of an organization. Klitgaard stressed that “when the role of the agencies in charge of fighting corruption are not clear, the control of corruption is weak” (Klitgaard, 1988). For example, ambiguous roles could exist when different organizations are in charge of controlling an economic sector without a clear coordination between them concerning the monitoring. In such case, any agency does not know clearly what the others are doing since their roles are not adequately specified. Role ambiguity could increase when the number of social actors involved in a process increases. For example, the anthropologist De Soto (1990) argued that when it takes more than 300 full days to obtain the necessary permits to start a small business in Peru, illegal activities and corruption may be perceived as inevitable by entrepreneurs. In the same line, Fredriksson showed that the increased number of intermediaries raises corruption