Tactics for Internal Compliance: A Literature Review

Compliance of organizations with internal and external norms is a highly relevant topic for both practitioners and academics nowadays. However, the substantive, elementary compliance tactics that organizations can use for achieving internal compliance have been described in a fragmented manner and in the literatures of distinct academic disciplines. Using a multidisciplinary structured literature review of 134 publications, this study offers three contributions. First, we present a typology of 45 compliance tactics, which constitutes a comprehensive and rich overview of elementary ways for bringing the organization into compliance. Secondly, we provide an overview of fundamental concepts in the theory of compliance, which forms the basis for the framework we developed for positioning compliance tactics and for analyzing or developing compliance strategies. Thirdly, we present insights for moving from compliance tactics to compliance strategies. In the process, and using the multidisciplinary literature review to take a bird's-eye view, we demonstrate that compliance strategies need to be regarded as a richer concept than perceived hitherto. We also show that opportunities for innovation exist.