How does corruption take root inside organizations that are outwardly legitimate and explicitly “zero tolerance?” Drawing on 9 years of co-constructed autoethnographic research from within an international NGO operating in coastal Bangladesh, we examine how entrepreneurial competencies can be redeployed for corrupt ends through the exploitation—and active production—of institutional and organizational voids. We extend Cavotta and Phillips’ model of corrupt entrepreneurship by developing a multi-level account that links macro-level institutional voids to meso-level organizational voids (gaps in oversight, accountability, and communication) and to micro-level entrepreneurial action. Integrating Mars’ workplace crime typology, we show how a strategically positioned insider (akin to Mars’ “Hawk” archetype) built a sophisticated “parasitic enterprise” within its NGO “host,” using a portfolio of illicit “products,” dual accounting systems, and a hub-and-spoke structure to extract value while maintaining legitimacy and avoiding scrutiny. These dynamics generate a recursive feedback loop in which individual-level practices widen organizational voids and, in turn, reproduce the very institutional conditions that enable corruption to persist. Methodologically, the study demonstrates how autoethnography can surface the covert, processual, and emotionally charged mechanisms through which corrupt entrepreneurship unfolds—processes rarely accessible via conventional research designs. Practically, we derive actionable insights for addressing entrenched corruption within organizations, highlighting how “dark” entrepreneurial capabilities can be redirected toward ethical ends through adaptive—not purely punitive—controls, including the replacement of easily gamified performance indicators with substantive ones and the deliberate embedding of “outsiderness” into management structures.
Muurlink et al. (Sun,) studied this question.