With the revelation of questionably ethical practices at the world's most innovative firms, scholars and practitioners have begun to question whether a link might exist between innovation and wrongdoing. We introduce the concept of organizational permissiveness—i.e., tolerance of employees' norm-challenging behavior—to begin unpacking the relationships between cognitive norm-breaking, radical innovation, and corporate wrongdoing. We argue that organizational permissiveness partially mediates the effects of innovation-intensive strategy on innovation outcomes and multiple types of corporate wrongdoing. We analyze a sample of publicly held U.S. firms to demonstrate that the norm-breaking necessary for radical innovation also can produce corporate wrongdoing. Moreover, organizational permissiveness is a mechanism leading to both outcomes. We then use a smaller-sample quasi-experiment examining how merger and acquisition events affect individual scientists' patenting behavior. This provides further support for our hypothesized causal assertions.

随着世界上最具创新力的公司中有问题的道德实践的曝光，学者和从业者开始质疑创新与不法行为之间是否存在联系。我们引入了组织宽容的概念——即对员工挑战规范行为的容忍度——以开始解析认知规范打破、激进创新和企业不当行为之间的关系。我们认为，组织宽容度部分地调节了创新密集型战略对创新成果的影响，并且多种类型的企业不法行为。我们分析了美国上市公司的样本，以证明激进创新所必需的打破常规也会导致公司不法行为。此外，组织宽容是导致这两种结果的机制。然后，我们使用较小样本的准实验来检验合并和收购事件如何影响个别科学家的专利行为。这为我们假设的因果断言提供了进一步的支持。