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What characterizes useful illegality?

  • Friday, 25. October 2024

It is not easy to get to the bottom of an organization’s culture. Culture cannot be decided and is therefore not easy to discuss. Fortunately, organizational sociology provides a heuristic that helps to investigate the relevant phenomena. We call them the searchlights of organizational culture.

In this series, we present these searchlights. This article discusses useful illegality.

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The mere combination of the two terms “useful” and “illegality” makes people feel uneasy: How can something be useful if it does not comply with the rules? The charm of this searchlight lies precisely in this combination: It is both useful and illegal. Useful illegality is understood to mean deviations from rules which, although they contravene formal expectations, also perform a function for an organization so that the infringement also proves beneficial to the organization (Kühl 2020)1.

The reasons for this can lie both within and outside an organization. “Internal illegality” is homemade: Every organization divides up its work via functions or some alternative scheme and sets rules by which the different units should, or should not, collaborate. A consistent order of expectations is formally required to start with so that compliant and divergent behavior is not simultaneously permitted. However, organizations are constantly confronted with inconsistencies because, for example, internal processes create conflicting goals or customers’ requirements do not fit thevsales organization’s internal routines and regulations. So, there may be good reasons to break the
rules in specific cases in order to find a good solution in the interests of the organization.

Useful illegality: Conduct that is not covered by formal structures but performs functions for an organization.

In practice, therefore, rules are pragmatically handled, even though formality actually demands an unequivocal rulebook. Otherwise, an organization’s members could not be reliably tied in. This means that officially speaking, organizations have to commit to compliance with their own rules; yet, at the same time, they cannot operate without deviations from them.

For the organization’s members, this means that useful illegality can only ever be discussed properly within the protected circle of those in the know. But even if this is a fairly wide group and may include managerial staff, useful illegality cannot be officially recognized, only condoned.

What function does useful illegality fulfil for an organization?

If people were to work to rule in an organization (i.e., strictly to the formal rulebook), the result might be total standstill. But if “useful” illegal actions are carried out (and tolerated), the infringement will have positive effects as the organization will remain adaptable to expectations, the department next door will be happier if a certain document is made available to it before being
signed off, and a key customer will be satisfied because it realizes it enjoys a high priority, even though applicable rules are contravened.

Action is only possible if divergences from the rules are tolerated. This way, solutions can be found to problems that cannot be solved formally. Time-consuming coordination is avoided and a work deadline, though much too ambitious, is met. With the gaps in the organization’s rules filled, it is thus possible to act – even without formal rules.

Instead of stopping the conveyor belt and thereby risking a major production outage, for example, a minor adjustment, which is officially illegal, can be made without stopping the machine. Or people compensate for nonsensical rules and find innovative ways to solve problems. In that sense, non-compliance becomes a source of innovation for an organization.

What consequential problems does this entail?

The fact that diverging from the rules entails dysfunctional consequences presumably needs no explanation. However, such consequences add a particular spice to an organization because useful illegality generally remains latent and therefore cannot be openly discussed. If queries are
raised about routine infringements of the rules which, for example, have reached managers’ ears, the employees concerned frequently counter by telling them that there must have been a mistake– after all, everything is done by the book!

It is therefore essential to somehow integrate the protection and concealment of illegalities into normal operations – without causing disruption. Anyone who diverges from formal expectations not only needs the courage to break a rule; they cannot allow themselves to get caught, or they are well advised to ensure that their conduct is tolerated, as it were to ensure the infringement is personally credited to them. As a general rule, such a divergence is always treatedas individual conduct – with the respective consequences.

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If employees break some rules in the organization’s interests, they will not be protected from the consequences if the infringement is detected, e.g., when something goes wrong. If someone drives too fast on the company site in order to achieve a particular shift’s target and causes an accident, that person will be blamed – and not the organization that sets excessively high shift
targets.

The divergence from the rules will be attributed to the person and not to their role. In other words, employees are assuming a high level of personal risk for their organization. After all, when it comes to avoiding any harm for the organization, a finger will be very quickly pointed at “the culprits” in a case of doubt. In most cases, it is not a question of whether they were acting
in the organization’s interests (or least trying to). Moreover, if a company is looking for reasons to part with certain employees, it will be easy to identify them in any search for divergences from the formal rules.

Another challenge regarding “useful illegal” ways of working is that such conduct cannot be demanded of an organization’s recently recruited members – and such employees have to be very cautiously familiarized with those ways of working. That cannot be part of the official onboarding process or mentioned in any formal documentation. This makes it very difficult to learn from mistakes or spread good new ideas. After all, what is not written down anywhere can hardly be shared with a broader audience. The divergence of formal processes from de facto “useful illegal” practices frustrates any efforts to optimize formal processes.

These questions should be considered:

  • What rule infringements occur repeatedly?
  • Are there any workarounds without which a company would scarcely be able to operate?

This article is an excerpt from the white paper “Nail the pudding to the wall! How to analyse, discuss – and successfully influence – your organization’s culture”. The full whitepaper is available to download free of charge here.

Literature

[1] Kühl, Stefan 2020. Brauchbare Illegalität. Vom Nutzen des Regelbruchs in Organisationen. Frankfurt a. M.: Campus.