  We complement the rich conceptual work on organizational corruption by
quantitatively modelling the spread of corruption within organizations. We
systematically vary four organizational culture-related parameters, i.e.,
organization structure, location of bad apple, employees propensity to become
corrupted (corruption probability), and number of whistle-blowers. Our
simulation studies find that in organizations with flatter structures,
corruption permeates the organization at a lower threshold value of corruption
probability compared to those with taller structures. However, the final
proportion of corrupted individuals is higher in the latter as compared to the
former. Also, we find that for a 1,000 strong organization, 5 percent of the
workforce is a critical threshold in terms of the number of whistle-blowers
needed to constrain the spread of corruption, and if this number is around 25
percent, the corruption contagion is negligible. Implications of our results
are discussed.
