Interesting question—and the Scientific American has an article on it:

• People compete against one another to come out on top—and they also collaborate with others to succeed. This yin and yang of our natures expresses itself in the working world today just as it did in our ancestors as they struggled to survive and thrive.

• Studies of how corporations work give us insights into the evolutionary underpinnings of our morality, including concepts such as reciprocity, altruism and fairness.

• Examining the history of two companies, Enron and Google, illuminates the interplay of personal relationships and social institutions in the modern world.

In the 1987 film Wall Street, Michael Douglas’s character, the high-rolling corporate raider Gordon Gekko, explains why America has lost its standing atop the industrial world: “The new law of evolution in corporate America seems to be survival of the unfittest. Well, in my book you either do it right or you get eliminated.” He elaborates:

The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed—for lack of a better word—is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms—greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge—has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed—you mark my words—will not only save Teldar Paper but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.

In the now famous “greed” speech, we find several myths that I hope to bust in this article: that capitalism is grounded in and depends on cutthroat com­petition; that businesspeople must be self-centered and egotistical to achieve success; that evolution is selfish and only winnows and never creates; and, of course, that greed is good.

Humans are by nature tribal and xenophobic, and thus evolution has enabled in all of us the capacity for evil. Fortunately, we are also by nature prosocial and cooperative. By studying how modern companies work, we can gain insights into the evolutionary underpinnings of our morality, including concepts such as reciprocity, altruism and fairness. When we apply these evolutionary findings to economic life, we learn that Enron and the Gordon Gekko “Greed Is Good” ethic are the exception and that Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” motto is the rule. Two conditions must be present to accentuate the latter: first, internal trust reinforced by personal relationships, and, second, external rules supported by social institutions. The contrast between Enron and Google here serves to demonstrate what in corporate environments creates trust or distrust.

When President George W. Bush made a public statement about the Enron disaster, he attributed the company’s downfall to a “few bad apples,” as he would later also explain the Iraqi prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib. The theory about a few bad apples, however, does not explain what happened at Enron, nor does it give us any deeper insight into the psychology of corporate malfeasance. In a comprehensive study of the evolution of Enron’s corporate culture, management analysts Clinton Free and Norman Macintosh of the Queen’s University School of Business in Ontario found that something happened between the time of Richard D. Kinder’s term as president from 1986 to 1996, when Enron operated with a highly effective managerial system that included transparent governance practices, and Jeffrey Skilling’s era, from 1996 to 2001, in which openness and the opportunity for checks and balances were neutralized. What was it?

Enron began in 1985, when Kenneth Lay orchestrated the merger of the Houston Gas Company with Internorth, Inc., becoming CEO of the new energy corporation. Lay then hired Kinder to run it for him while he brokered deals and curried political favors in Washington. During part of the Kinder era, from 1990 to 1996, Enron’s reported earnings increased from $202 million to $584 million, while its revenues skyrocketed from $5.3 billion to $13.4 billion.

The keys to Kinder’s management style were transparency, accountability and his own personal involvement at every level of the company. At regular meetings with managers and department heads, Kinder expected everyone to come prepared to be grilled in great detail about every aspect of their job, and with a near photographic memory Kinder was not easily fooled. As one manager later remembered, “You could give him a budget number and explain where it came from and he’d say, ‘That’s not what you told me last year.’ And then he’d go to his desk and retrieve the year-earlier budget and prove you wrong. It was amazing.” Another unit leader said that Kinder “was impossible to bullshit,” and if managers “lied to him about their numbers, Rich would eat them for lunch.”

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