Factors leading to business process noncompliance and its positive and negative effects: Empirical insights from a case study

Many organizations face noncompliance in their business processes. Such noncompliant behavior can range from well-intended actions to the deliberate omission of essential tasks. The current view on noncompliance is mostly negative and many researchers discuss how to avoid it altogether. A gap in the research is a lack of empirical insights on when noncompliance has positive and when it has negative effects. Against this background, we conduct a qualitative study in the customer service department of a company hosting one of Europe's leading online project platforms. Differing from previous studies on business process noncompliance, the starting point of our study is direct observations of how employees conduct their work. We found that noncompliant behavior with a positive intention had a mostly positive effect on business process outcomes. Unintended factors of noncompliance, such as a lack of knowledge or carelessness, caused the most severe negative impact on business process outcomes.