The good, the bad and the ugly: whistleblowing outcomes

Risky Rescues and the Duty to Blow the Whistle

“…This figure might be biased because the survey only included whistleblowers who still worked for the company where they blew the whistle. Researching whistleblowing in the Australian public sector, Smith and Brown (2008) found that 20-30% of whistleblowers experienced bad treatment from management or colleagues. Although this gives a less bleak picture of whistleblowing outcomes than what Alford (2001) suggests, Brown and Olsen (2008) comment that these figures are in fact sizeable and impact negatively on others' willingness to raise a concern.…”

An International Comparison of the Incidence of Public Sector Whistle‐Blowing and the Prediction of Retaliation: Australia, Norway, and the US

“…Some writers (e.g., Farrell and Petersen ; Johnson ; Jubb ) suggested that only employees who used external channels to report wrongdoing should be viewed as actual whistle‐blowers. However, research findings suggest that the vast majority of whistle‐blowers first report the wrongdoing through internal channels in the organisation and only a small percentage turn to external channels subsequently, when they find the organisation has not responded to the initial complaint (e.g., Brown, Mazurski, and Olsen ; Donkin, Smith, and Brown ; Miceli, Near, and Dworkin ), or when they are “outed” as the source of the report by the media or an external agency, such as Congress, as happened with Sherron Watkins from Enron (Lacayo and Ripley ). Further, some statutes in the US and elsewhere label internal reports as “whistle‐blowing” and may even require internal reporting in order to preserve opportunities for legal protection (e.g., Near, Dworkin, and Miceli ; Sarbanes‐Oxley Act ).…”

“…One other important finding from the Australian study was that whistle‐blowers whose disclosures were not formally substantiated faced a much greater risk of mistreatment or reprisals (Brown and Olsen ; Smith and Brown ). This question was not examined in the studies in the other two countries, but the finding is consistent with one from a very early whistle‐blowing study in the US (Parmerlee, Near, and Jensen ), which showed that the self‐reported validity of discrimination complaints as determined by a federal agency was inversely associated with perceived retaliation.…”

“…We noted one example above, from the internal witness survey in comparison with the employee survey results. As another example, “in the case study agencies, even 21% of the manager respondents, and as many as 41% of the casehandler respondents, thought that, overall, management treated whistleblowers either ‘quite badly’ or ‘extremely badly’ in their organisations” (Smith and Brown : 142). This additional information is certainly helpful but the point remains that the individual data from the whistleblower questionnaires were not verified independently by some other source for that particular case.…”

“…In recent years, journalists and others have documented whistle‐blowing instances in countries around the world, such as India, Ireland, Israel, and Japan (e.g., for a partial listing, see Miceli, Near, and Dworkin ). Researchers have studied how culture, economic systems, and legal and regulatory environments may affect observation and labelling of wrongdoing, whistle‐blowing and its consequences (e.g., Brown et al ; Brown and Roberts ; Caiden and Truelson , ; Callahan, Dworkin, and Lewis ; Calland and Dehn ; Dworkin ; Lewis ; Miceli, Near, and Dworkin , ; Moberly , ; Smith and Brown ; Vandekerckhove ). However, until recently, much of the existing published empirical research on whistle‐blowing has been completed in North America; it is not at all clear whether recommendations derived from extant findings are relevant for the public sector in other countries (e.g., Miceli, Near, and Dworkin ).…”