Motivating Whistleblowers

Abstract

Law-breaking activities within an organization bene…ting the …rm at the expense of the general public are widespread but di¢cult to uncover, making whistleblowing by employees desirable. We employ a novel laboratory experiment to investigate if and how monetary incentives and expectations of social approval or disapproval, and their interactions, a¤ect the decision to blow the whistle. Experimental results show that: i) …nancial rewards signi…cantly increase the likelihood of whistleblowing and do not substantially crowd out non-monetary motivations activated by expectations of social judgment; and ii) the possibility of social judgment decreases (increases) whistleblowing when the public is unaware (aware) of the negative externalities generated by fraud, suggesting that whistleblowers are at least partly motivated by a desire for social approval. Our …ndings suggest that whistleblowers on corporate fraud should be …nancially rewarded and should be shielded from public/media scrutiny when the social cost of the illegal activity is not visible or salient to the public. We also …nd evidence of an interesting relationship between political orientation and social judgment: while left-leaning subjects react to the possibility of receiving social approval or disapproval as expected, right-leaning people are una¤ected by it.

Blame Game Theory: Scapegoating, Whistleblowing and Discursive Struggles following Accusations of Organizational Misconduct

“…The word ‘games’ is used as a metaphor (Cornelissen, 2005) to signal the agency that accused individual and organizational actors have to discursively maneuvre a situation of proven or alleged organizational misconduct. We assume that those actors instrumentally adopt discursive positions in this context (Butler et al, 2020) and that they do so by assessing elements of the social context, in particular ambiguity, that might make those positions credible.…”

“…Lacking power and status, whistleblowers rely on external relays to trigger change (Near & Miceli, 1995; Summers-Effler, 2002; Weiskopf & Tobias-Miersch, 2016). While ethical and moral judgements are often seen as a critical precursor of whistleblowing (Chiu, 2003), we focus here on situations where the whistleblowing is triggered by strategic motives (Butler et al, 2020; Choo et al, 2019). The positive outcomes from such an opportunistic move can be an active driver and precursor of the act of whistleblowing in the first place (Culiberg & Mihelič, 2017).…”

“…We can expect the discursive strategies of scapegoating and whistleblowing to be met by discursive reactions that target the discourses which started the blame game. Up until now, we have conceptualized whistleblowing as a pre-emptive strategy (proposition 3b): individual actors at risk of being blamed by the organization pre-empt such scapegoating by blowing the whistle (Butler et al, 2020). However, if scapegoating happens first, whistleblowing will become an individual-level discursive reaction to scapegoating discourses.…”

“…We therefore know little about how the dynamics that unfold following an accusation of misconduct contribute to the social construction of misconduct and, in particular, about how the accused organization itself responds to allegations of misconduct and influences its social construction. At the same time, the nature of the situation following an accusation of misconduct makes it highly likely that the accused organization will respond strategically and influence the social construction of misconduct (Butler, Serra, & Spagnolo, 2020).…”

Myths and numbers on whistleblower rewards

“…Butler et al . (2017) conducted experiments in a setting in which wrongdoing caused financial losses to third parties, whistleblowers did not take part in the wrongdoing, and the whistleblowing was costly. They find strong evidence that financial rewards generally substantially increase whistleblowing.…”