Abstract

Organisational culture is assumed to be a key factor in large-scale and avoidable institutional failures. Whilst models such as “ethical culture” and “safety culture” have been used to explain such failures, minimal research has investigated their ability to do so, and a single and unified model of the role of culture in institutional failures is lacking. To address this, we systematically identified case study articles investigating the relationship between culture and institutional failures relating to ethics and risk management. A content analysis of the cultural factors leading to failures found 23 common factors and a common sequential pattern. First, culture is described as causing practices that develop into institutional failure. Second, and usually sequentially related to causal culture, culture is also used to describe the problems of correction: how people, in most cases, had the opportunity to correct a problem and avert failure, but did not take appropriate action. It was established that most of the cultural factors identified in the case studies were consistent with survey-based models of safety culture and ethical culture. Failures of safety and ethics also largely involve the same causal and corrective factors of culture, although some aspects of culture more frequently precede certain outcome types. We propose that the distinction between causal and corrective culture can form the basis of a unified and generalisable model of organisational failure.