Did Cheating Help the Houston Astros Win? Organizational Misconduct, Illicit Competitive Intelligence, and Organizational Performance

We examine how organizational misconduct through “sign stealing,” a form of illicit competitive intelligence, affected the Houston Astros’ (batting) performance in Major League Baseball. Detailed data from this empirical context shed light on an understudied and important research question: Does organizational misconduct necessarily increase organizational performance? Adopting an empirical design that leverages the Astros’ ability to cheat only in home games, we find that the Astros gained no discernible advantage from cheating, both on average and even under supportive moderating conditions. We abductively explain this unexpected discovery with three plausible explanations—(1) organizational–professional identity conflict, (2) information leakage, and (3) disruption of routines—using well-established theoretical lenses and qualitative evidence available within the context of our empirical setting. Each of these explanations suggest novel theoretical propositions that delineate when and why organizations may not derive performance advantages from illicit competitive intelligence, which in turn may generalize to other organizational settings and be empirically tested in future research. Our study has broad implications for research on organizational misconduct, and especially the collection and use of illicit competitive intelligence.