An upside to the Ashley Madison hack: it’s a research goldmine.

New research out of Tulane University and Michigan State University uses the leaked data to look at how corporate cultures affect business ethics, creativity and success.

The prevailing wisdom in management studies is that companies with high integrity and strict corporate cultures tend to perform well. But what about places where the ethical line is a little more blurred?

In a study that is currently being submitted for peer review, researchers William Grieser and Nishad Kapadia at Tulane and Qingqiu Li and Andrei Simonov at Michigan State hypothesized that a looser corporate culture may have some benefits, mainly, it may attract creative talent.

“It’s a tradeoff,” Grieser told the Star.

“You’ll actually find it hard to come up with one (person) who was famous for being creative who was ethical on all dimensions.”

Ashley Madison, which helps people cheat on their spouses, provided the perfect data set. Although the morality of infidelity is a complex issue, Grieser said having an affair means you’re lying to at least one person — your spouse.

“By most accounts people would consider these more questionable ethics,” he said.

Most studies of corporate culture are based on self-reported assessments, and are only as valid as the answers respondents are willing to volunteer.

“Obviously the worst corporate cultures are more likely to have employees who lie on surveys,” Grieser said.

But the leaked data provided an unvarnished look into what employees might really be up to.

Grieser and his colleagues found that companies with high numbers of Ashley Madison users were more likely to engage in unethical behaviour — but they were also more likely to be creative.

Firms with higher proportions of Ashley Madison users were more than twice as likely to be associated with corruption or bribery, and more likely to have had had an accounting misstatement over the past year.

It wasn’t all negative. Firms with higher proportions of Ashley Madison users were also more likely to innovate, cared more about research and development and applied for more patents.

“Overall, our results provide an explanation for why we don't observe all firms gravitate toward one ‘ideal’ corporate culture. Different cultures have differing costs and benefits, and as with much else, there are no black and white answers to what constitutes a perfect culture; there are only shades of gray,” the study concluded.

There were some concerns — mainly, because Ashley Madison didn’t use email verification, a corporate email address was not proof that somebody belonging to the company was a subscriber.

In order to weed out the fake users, Grieser and his colleagues only looked at data from accounts that had purchased credits to send at least one message to another user.

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In total, the study looked at 47,000 customers who used corporate email addresses to set up an account on Ashley Madison between 2002-2014.

The research team was also concerned about the ethical implications of using data that had been leaked online by hackers, so they hired an outside party to make the data anonymous.