How bad behavior bubbles below the radarĪn employee may not come forward right away to expose wrongdoing at a corporation for many reasons. “We show that this aggregation of information is not only a leading indicator of violations of rules and regulations, but it’s even a leading indicator of the whistleblower complaints themselves,” Campbell says of the study that resulted, which is forthcoming in the journal Management Science.
In a business environment where ethics are paramount, the findings may offer managers and compliance departments a new way to stop fraud before it starts. Harnessing machine learning to analyze text, they found that the reviews could serve as canaries in the coal mine of corporate misconduct, pointing to cultural factors that might eventually result in scandal earlier than they would otherwise attract attention. To find upstream indicators of culture gone sour, they scraped employee reviews from, a website where employees can leave subjective anonymous reviews about their employer. In an attempt to discover whether these problems could be exposed earlier, Campbell conducted an experiment with Ruidi Shang of Tilburg University in the Netherlands. “But even though this stuff can be pretty widespread inside of companies when it occurs, it’s not getting out in a timely way.”
“You think about Wells Fargo, and there were thousands of employees engaging in these practices over many, many years,” says Campbell, who specializes in accounting and control. Far from being just a few bad apples, most business improprieties occur within a widespread culture of bad behavior-or at least, a lot of people looking the other way as misconduct is taking place, he says. “But what you start to realize is that the problems that have been uncovered have been going on for a very long time,” says Dennis Campbell, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. Corporate scandals often follow a pattern: Whether it’s Theranos and its fraudulent blood testing technology, Wells Fargo and its fake financial accounts, or Volkswagen and its bogus emissions data, a whistleblower eventually comes forward to expose the behavior, and executives are held accountable.
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