| dc.description.abstract | The aim of this master's thesis is to understand how organisational elements influence employees' compliance behaviour. To achieve this goal, we will examine the interviewees' responses to the challenges they experience with compliance and explore connections with the organisational conditions of the human error framework as well as a systematic literature review (SLR). By combining these insights, we will develop a holistic compliance behaviour framework. Our research question: How do organisational elements impact employee compliance behaviours?, will govern our exploration.
The primary purpose of the study is to investigate how organisational elements also influence compliance behaviour, as this is scarcely discussed in the literature. It is a well-known phenomenon that humans are seen as the weakest link, therefore we wanted to investigate the underlying organisational conditions that may have influenced this person's compliance behaviour.
In this thesis, we have conducted a qualitative case study where we have interviewed eight people related to a social welfare organisation (SWO) in Norway. The findings lead to the creation of a compliance behaviour framework consisting of five influential elements and how these altogether explain compliance behaviour, and the resulting consequences. By integrating our findings into the framework, it provides a visual understanding of how the organisation and the employees constitute compliance behaviour.
The findings showed that organisational elements such as culture, hierarchy, leadership, technology and structure influence employees' compliance behaviour in retrospect. We also discovered some new findings that impacted compliance, such as trust, environment and information sharing. Some of these areas had limited documentation, or were not previously documented. The findings are transferable to organisations outside the social welfare industry, and the research can thus be applied to a number of different sectors.
The implications for the research include a compliance behaviour framework, where we have findings on the same themes as in SLR, e.g. hierarchy, moral reasoning and technology, but that the perspective is different, where we see it through an organisational lens. In addition, we contribute by exploring new themes such as trust, environment and information sharing, and the change of perspective from individual to an organisational one. The practical implications from our research entails the identified stakeholders, the ability to implement our framework into consideration when creating policies and look for underlying root causes for compliance behaviour in an organisational context. | |
