The Right Way to Manage Rule Breakers

**Alison Beard** (0:01)
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**Michael Gill** (0:54)
Hello, everyone, I'm Michael Gill, and you've tuned in to the Harvard Business Review IdeaCast. Don't worry, I have Alison Beard with me here as well.

**Alison Beard** (1:08)
Hi, everyone.

**Michael Gill** (1:09)
But we wanted to switch things up a bit today because I recently contributed to an HBR article about rule breaking in organizations and how leaders can manage it.

**Alison Beard** (1:20)
And so, while Adi and I typically introduce all of our episodes, our producer, Mary, agreed to let Michael bend the rules in this instance. But Michael, how should I deal with this rule breaking of yours?

**Michael Gill** (1:31)
Well, one of the main findings of my research is that when it comes to dealing with rule breakers, the first thing to do is really understand the motivation behind the behavior.
And for me, it was to prove that rule breaking isn't always a bad thing. In this case, it maybe got listeners more interested in the topic.

**Alison Beard** (1:51)
I certainly hope so, and I want to dig into that and much more. But first, let me properly introduce you. Michael is an associate professor at the University of Oxford Saïd Business School, and his research, a synthesis of more than 250 studies across four decades, was featured in the HBR article, How the Best Leaders Respond to Rule Breaking.
Welcome to the show that you've already opened, Michael.

**Michael Gill** (2:13)
Thank you very much for having me.

**Alison Beard** (2:18)
Okay, so how big a problem is this for leaders right now? Are employees and managers breaking more rules than they have in the past?

**Michael Gill** (2:26)
So we have different pieces of evidence that suggest that rule breaking is very commonplace, and in many instances on the rise. So for example, the Ethics and Compliance Initiatives 2023 Global Business Ethics Survey reported that 65% of employees around the world said they had observed misconduct at work, and that's up from 60% three years earlier in 2020
And in the United States, more than half of workers reported seeing rule breaking, and prior surveys found much lower levels. So that does suggest that the problem is increasing. To understand how common or frequent this is, is really difficult because lots of organizations, for obvious reasons, don't want to talk about it. But with the evidence that's out there, and certainly in my study, we can see that rule breaking is happening in all sorts of organizations, in all sorts of places and industries around the world. And it is really common. And I think one thing to reflect on is if you've ever encountered rule breaking, and I suspect most people have.

**Alison Beard** (3:34)
Yeah. And I imagine that there are a couple trends that might have led to an increase in rule breaking. I think of remote work, which means less oversight. I think of people using new AI tools in ways they shouldn't or aren't sanctioned by the organization.
So I'm hoping it's that, not just like moral decline.

**Michael Gill** (3:54)
I hope so too. I think that you're absolutely right. I think with the rise of new technologies and new tools, and often areas of gray, where people are not sure whether or not you can do this, and organizations might not fully understand what their rules are dictating. Absolutely, it could be driven by issues of AI.
And I'd like to think that there isn't a sustained moral decline. But I do think that people will break rules for all sorts of reasons. And sometimes that will be the self-interested reasons. And sometimes it will be because they're trying to help people. And the technology we're now embracing can make all of those different explanations just as valid of those as they've always been.

**Alison Beard** (4:35)
So you said not all rule breaking is bad. What exactly did you find in your research about that in terms of different motivations?

**Michael Gill** (4:44)
The nub of the research article is that there's a lot of different research about rule breaking. And it's across the fields of management and sociology and economics and criminology. But these different literatures tended to offer different explanations for why people break rules, but didn't really speak to one another. So what I've tried to do in this study is to pull all those different explanations together.