The Corruption of Project Governance Through Normalization of Deviance

Organizational mistakes and accidents have a long history in practice been studied extensively the engineering organizational literature. One of primary causes persistent error is existence deviance; i.e., behavior violating norms. We examined behaviors motivations project team members situations where deviant had accepted normalized as part operations. used NVivo content analysis to classify narratives 52 professionals they related normalization deviance (NoD) situations, their perceived causes, subsequent outcomes for organizations. Our findings suggest that NoD occurs three dimensions: processes, relationships, outcomes. discuss implications these organization performance improvement avoiding situations.