**4.1 An intense emphasis on monetary success (Pressure)**

An intense emphasis on monetary success in the corporate environment, which promotes productivity and innovation, also induces fraud by corporate executives. Messner and Rosenfeld (1994, p.8) argue that monetary success, which is responsible for the impressive accomplishments of American society, is also responsible for generating strong pressures to succeed in a narrowly defined way and to pursue such success by "any means necessary" including fraud. In other words, while monetary success has provided the motivational dynamic for entrepreneurship, corporate expansion, extraordinary technological innovation, and high rates of social mobility, it also has provided the motivational dynamic for greed, corporate fraud, unethical behavior, and illegal act.2
