Trapped in deception: Corporate culture, sustainability, and project lifecycle

Abstract

It appears that supply chains are more prone to deception over the past years as new cases are frequently reported. Enron, Volkswagen, Takata, Boeing, or NASA are just a few organisations to have alleged cases of deception to, among others, hide their lack of quality, failure to provide promised technological development, or thrive their profits. The increasing number of reports may align with the stronger proliferation of system integration and data transparency in supply chains and the exogenous opportunity to evaluate the performance of organisations and, hence, the ability to identify suspicious behaviour using big data. Nonetheless, the discovery generally precedes an (unintentional) revealing incident where a first suspicion has to be manifested by further evidence or an admittance by the deceptive organisation. To our knowledge, there is no method or framework to support the identification of deception at an early stage. We use the proposed Deception Impact Model (DIM) by Hammadi et al. (2018) to map organisation’s position and its trajectory over time on the three dimensions of sustainable practices, impact on consumer, and severity of deception. DIM is further used to explore the relation between the strategic CSR with its sustainability goals and the actual implementation of sustainable practices. The recent scandals contradict the assumption that the integration of sustainable practices in the organisational culture is about respecting the triple bottom line and discouraging deception. Acknowledging that consumers are increasingly requesting sustainable practices, it would be expected to see ethical and sustainable behaviour in organisations and along the supply chain. We investigate the timeline of the Boeing 737 MAX case and use DIM in the context of CSR to identify gaps in preventing or demotivating deception in organisations and supply chains.