**5. Concluding Remarks**

This study aimed at examining the influence of corporate culture on combating bribery practices, an aspect of corporate sustainability, and its subsequent impact on organisational performance. This survey-based quantitative study was based on the responses from a total of 201 mid-to-high level managers employed in Bangladeshi organisations. The survey data were analysed for SEM by employing the AMOS software. The findings highlight the importance of corporate culture: outcome orientation and stability cultures on combating bribery practices within organisations. The findings also provide evidence of positive associations between the combating bribery aspect of corporate sustainability practices and organisational financial and non-financial performance.

The evidence of corporate-level bribery practices provides interesting findings relating to its practical implications and the ability of the corporations to enhance their CSR engagement. This paper offers several policy implications. The regulators from emerging countries may move to mandatory CSR disclosure and investment from voluntary CSR practices by corporations. Given the social responsibility motivation of CSR, this study opens an arena of CSR as a medium of anti-corporate bribery behaviour. This study has an impact on substantial policy implications for emerging markets, such as encouraging corporations, stakeholders, ethical consumers, socially sensible investors, creditors and regulatory bodies to reciprocally cooperate for the benefits of CSR commitments, as a tool to restrict the risk of corporate-level bribery. The positive impact of CSR commitments may support resolving agency conflict between corporations, shareholders and society [37].

Similar to the other survey-based studies, this study is under the general limitation of survey-based research [58]. First, the determination of the causal relationships among variables is hard and treated as a common issue in the survey-based study [31]. Hence, future quantitative studies based on archival and/or panel data (longitudinal data) may improve generalisability of the findings within the field of this study [31,59,60]. Second, the study collected data from a respondent from each of the sampled organisations, which may raise the issue of representation of the company to which the respondent belongs. Accordingly, future studies based on the responses from multiple respondents from the same organisation may improve the accuracy of the findings of the study.

### **6. Implications**

The findings of this empirical study contribute theoretically to the existing limited corporate sustainability literature, with insights into the role of suitable organisation culture, such as outcome orientation and stability culture on minimising bribery practices within the corporate environment. The findings also contribute theoretically to the corporate sustainability literature, with insights into the impact of sustainability practices towards enhancing the organisation financial and non-financial performance.

The findings of this study provide corporate practitioners and policymakers with practical implications of the importance of having a congenial corporate culture to promote and enhance corporate sustainability practices by reducing the likelihood of employees' ill practices, such as taking or offering bribes from/to organisations' business partners. This proposal of combating firm-level corporate bribery represents a comprehensive and innovative approach to the risk mitigation of the bribery impact on both financial and non-financial performance. Therefore, regulators and organisational policy implementors can create force on organisations to engage in high-level socially responsible activities to prohibit bribery and corruption. The understanding of such engagement is commendable and leads a clear path for other economies and corporations to move forward in corporate sustainability, and implement outcome orientation and stability within corporate culture towards limiting corporate-level bribery through sustainable and accountable business practices.

**Author Contributions:** Methodology, F.B.; Resources, P.M.; Data curation, F.B.; Writing—original draft, M.M.R., F.B. and I.M.; Supervision, M.M.R. and M.S.; Project administration, M.M.R.; Funding acquisition, M.S., P.M. and I.M. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** Not applicable.

**Informed Consent Statement:** Not applicable.

**Data Availability Statement:** Primary data is used, and questionnaire items are attached in Appendix A.

**Conflicts of Interest:** There is no conflict of interests among the authors.




