Nineteenth International Conference on Knowledge, Culture, and Change in Organizations

Abstract

The Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES) is facing a massive investigation of Brazilian government supervisory bodies and prosecutors focused on operations during the administration of the Workers’ Party from 2003 to 2016. This article, a single case study, analyzes the improvements in the BNDES governance until 2018. The methodology used is based on a qualitative analysis of news, press releases, information available on the BNDES website, analysis of practices, internal documents and semi-structured interviews with bank employees. Other governance and transparency practices of the National Development Banks (NDBs) are used as a reference for this analysis, which uses the third-order reflection process. The theoretical framework includes silences and absences in organization stories and discourse, ethical reputation building in corrupt environments, bounded awareness and its implication for ethical decision making. The results showed that the BNDES established an adequate internal decision-making process, based on norms and collegiate decisions, with performance similar to the benchmark in transparency. However, the process used to establish and transform public policy into actions, guidelines, and priorities needs to be improved to avoid potential conflict of interest and suspicions of influence and favoring of private corporations. Internal analytical practices may also benefit from a review to incorporate best ethical decision-making practices.