Companies increasingly adopt internal norms to enhance compliance with legal rules. However, the rapid growth in volume and complexity of such internal rules may obstruct employee knowledge and understanding of such internal rules, and therefore also their compliance. The present study seeks to understand whether shorter and more accessible formats of internal company norms will yield better knowledge and understanding of such norms. The study consists of an extensive online field experiment randomly assigning 1235 employees of an international technology company to four treatments. In the long policy condition, employees received a 19‐page traditional policy written in standard legalese language. The short policy condition entailed a shortened two‐page version of this classic policy, and in the infographic condition, employees received an illustrated overview of the essential rules on a single page. A fourth group received no policy and served as a control condition. After reading the policy, employees completed several measures assessing their rule knowledge, perceived social norms, and played an incentivized bribery game. We find that (a) none of the types of policies presented improves rule knowledge or reduces corrupt behavior compared to the control treatment, and (b) no differences exist between the policies in influencing rules knowledge or reducing corrupt behavior. Instead, we find robust evidence indicating that people form their beliefs about corporate norms and decide how to behave in situations presenting high‐corruption risk based on what they consider to be the norm. The paper discusses its implications for existing literature on codes of conduct and internal norms, on ethics training, as well as on legal knowledge development.

中文翻译：

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少多吗？关于反贿赂政策对员工知识和腐败行为影响的现场证据


公司越来越多地采用内部规范来加强对法律规则的遵守。然而，此类内部规则的数量和复杂性的快速增长可能会阻碍员工对此类内部规则的了解和理解，从而阻碍其合规性。本研究旨在了解更短、更易于访问的公司内部规范格式是否会产生对此类规范的更好知识和理解。该研究包括一项广泛的在线田间实验，将一家国际科技公司的 1235 名员工随机分配到四种治疗中。在长期保单条件中，员工会收到一份用标准法律语言编写的 19 页的传统保单。简短的政策条件需要这个经典政策的缩短两页版本，而在信息图条件中，员工在单个页面上收到了基本规则的图解概述。第四组没有接受策略，并作为控制条件。在阅读了政策后，员工完成了几项措施，评估了他们的规则知识、感知到的社会规范，并玩了一场激励性的贿赂游戏。我们发现 （a） 与控制处理相比，所提出的策略类型都没有提高规则知识或减少腐败行为，并且 （b） 这些策略在影响规则知识或减少腐败行为方面不存在差异。相反，我们发现强有力的证据表明，人们形成了他们对公司规范的信念，并根据他们认为的常态来决定在存在高腐败风险的情况下如何行事。本文讨论了它对现有关于行为准则和内部规范、道德培训以及法律知识发展的文献的影响。