Resumo

Studies on corruption are still incipient in the organizational behavior perspective. In a behavioral approach, the corrupt personality is generically treated in narrow conceptions associated, for instance, to character and sociopathy. Generally, ontological aspects on corruption have been addressed secondarily in relation to political, managerial, economic and cultural contingencies. However, organizational corruption may also be understood through symbolic interaction among individuals, groups and organizations, and as a development factor.

We intend to answer the following question: how do identities manifest themselves and contribute to a contagious process in organizational corruption? The objective of this study is to shed light on the manifestation of identities through symbolic interaction among individuals, groups and organizations, as an antecedent of organizational corruption.

Our conception framework consists on the context of individual interactions, identity manifestations and collective contagium to understand organizational corruption. We adopt the symbolic interactionism to interact those constructs using the following ideas: a) The meaning of things comes from some dynamic social interaction, b) Meanings may be manipulated and modified through an interpretative process; c) The individual and society are inseparable and interdependent units; d) The answer of an individual to an action of another person is based on the first meaning attributed to this action.

We adopted a methodology based on phenomenology. This method of inquiry is based on the premisse that reality consists of events as they are perceived in human consciousness. The phenomenological method poses two distinct challenges: the thematic and the expressive dimensions of inquiry, which have implications for semantic and mantic, discursive and nondiscursive understanding. Six organizational corruption phenomenas was selected to understand identities manifestations and the collective contagious of organization corruption.

The interactions indicate the first type of contacts generated through the relationship among agents who engage themselves in actions of corrupt nature. In the organizational corruption phenomena, the interactions are propagated in the internal and external environments and they follow the dynamics of the involved actor's strategy - the head and external and external support staff. The ambience of these actors' practices varies across the environment in the private sector, government agencies and society in general.

It is possible to infer that the corrupt agents acted driven by an illusory representation of normality and absence of risks, common among individuals, groups and organizations when they are taken by narcissistic disorder and conflict with organizational identity. For these agents, the regulatory environment is unbearably restrictive to meet their particular demands. Usually they overlap the other identities and underestimate the imminent risks, driven by an atomistic and illusory representation of normality and power.

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