Top management has an interest in the formalising of corporate case law in that it tightens management control and reduces the risk of wild idiosyncratic decisions...

The important benefit of enforcing the recording and systematising of ethical dilemmas, however, is that it fosters self-regulation, and, to the extent that the cases are made available to outsiders, government regulation. Costs would not be great. Executives do not encounter ethical dilemmas every day of the week, and on most occasions when they do, they will be dilemmas which generate an immediate resolution from a more senior person who has encountered problems of this type before.
The point of view which I heard again and again in the interviews was that the ethical climate of a corporation begins with, and is fundamentally determined by, the chief executive officer:37
He sets the tone and the rest of management fall in line. The ethical standards of anyone other than him don't matter so much. Well, unless you have one of those companies where an old guy at the helm has a right hand man making all the real decisions (American executive).
This conclusion is consistent with other evidence. Baumart (1968) found that executives ranked the behaviour of their superiors in the company as the principal determinant of unethical decisions. In a fifteen-year follow-up of Baumart's work, Brenner and Molander (1977) found superiors still ranked as the primary influence on unethical decision-making. Half of the 1977 sample of executives believed that superiors often do not want to know how results are obtained, so long as the desired outcome is achieved.
Such evidence provides a crime-prevention rationale for the Park decision. The law should attempt to make the chief executive officer uniquely susceptible to individual criminal responsibility because s/he is uniquely able to prevent corporate crime thoughout his or her organisation. The evidence also sustains a case for rendering chief executive officers especially vulnerable to some of the quite effective informal adverse publicity sanctions which can ginger up the compliance efforts of companies. Hence, congressional and parliamentary committees should make special efforts to get chief executive officers in front of the cameras when questions are being asked about the ethico-legal standards of their corporation.
While we know that the chief executive officer holds the key to making self-regulation work, it is difficult to specify what implica­tions this has for public policy. Perhaps the only suggestion is for public interest groups to transform their criticisms of corporations into personal attacks on the faceless chief executive officer as well. When the time comes for appointing new chief executive officers, public interest movements might convey the message to the board that the appointment of a certain person would lead to the corporation being singled out for special investigative attention. If the board goes ahead and appoints that person, it would be likely that s/he would be keen to head off trouble by demonstrating to consumerists that s/he is not the ogre they assumed. A more self- regulating corporation might be the result.
When Donald Rumsfeld was appointed chief executive officer of Searle in 1977 following the company's safety-testing crises, the appointment was criticised because Rumsfeld had held senior cabinet positions in the Nixon administration. However, one of Rumsfeld's first acts was to counter Searle's poor compliance record with an edict that staff were to be evaluated for promotion and incentive payments on the basis of their compliance record in addition to the usual criteria.38
Moving down the organisational hierarchy, it is important that pro-public interest constituencies within the corporation are given organisational clout. The great mistake which many critics of big business make is that corporations are unitary entities where every activity is guided by the goal of profit maximisation.
I've seen this firm grow from a small company to a very large one. When we were small, people would argue for things in terms of the overall interests of the corporation. Today people argue for
what is best for their group even if that is against the corporation's
interest. The bigger we become, the bigger that problem becomes
(senior American executive).
Once a compliance group is established in a transnational corpor­ation, it will tend to push for what is best for compliance, even in many situations when this is not in the profitability interests of the company.39 The performance and promotion prospects of people in the group will be assessed in terms of the goals of compliance rather than contribution to profits. To the extent that compliance staff perceive themselves as having a career line as compliance experts, they have a self-image and a secure base from which to restrain the excesses of the constituencies who are committed to 'profits at any cost', 'production targets at any cost', 'sales quotas at any cost', 'growth at any cost', 'new product registration at any cost'.