Towards the Design of Effective Whistleblowing Systems

Abstract

Whistleblowing systems serve as a vehicle for change, empowerment, and ethical/social responsibility. Organizational whistleblowing is a socially complex phenomenon that impacts people and organizations across various disciplines and sectors. Whistleblowing is a high-stakes act involving the dissemination of highly sensitive information about multiple actors with tangling stakes/interests. These features inherently make the task of designing effective whistleblowing systems (WS) a challenging one. To address this, our paper develops key design objectives (DO's) for effective WS. We do this by conducting a qualitative literature review of whistleblowing research and by availing elements from design science methods and stakeholder theory. We present four key DO's for effective WS, which we support with a whistleblowing news dataset. This paper serves as a first step in developing design principles (DP's) for effective WS. This research contributes to a growing discourse on organizational whistleblowing in the IS community.