2012/06/28 by Marcia P. Miceli, Marcia P Miceli, Janet P. Near +5 · 184 citations
Business, Management and Accounting · Decision Sciences · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Business ethics #Ethics in Business and Education #Job Satisfaction and Organizational Behavior #Law #Organizational commitment #Organizational justice #Political science #Psychology #Public relations #Social psychology #Transformational leadership #Whistle blowing #Workplace Violence and Bullying #Wrongdoing
paper · doi:10.1177/0018726712447004
published in Human Relations 65(8), 923-954 (SAGE Publishing)
openalex publication_date 2012/06/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/01
News reports of organizational wrongdoing often pique interest in the question of how to encourage employees to report it. We used data from a survey of more than 3000 organizational members in the US to test a model of whistle-blowing. As predicted, observation of wrongdoing generally was associated with lower perceived organizational support and lower perceived justice of reporting channels (both procedural justice and distributive justice), suggesting that tolerating wrongdoing has negative effects for the organization itself, but there was also evidence that correcting wrongdoing may be nearly as positive as preventing it. Three previously untested variables – proactive personality, less co-worker invalidation, and leverage in the specific situation – predicted whistle-blowing, as did strength of evidence, a variable for which prior findings were inconsistent. Gender also was related to whistle-blowing. Finally, the predictors of blowing the whistle exclusively to one’s supervisor were similar to those of using other channels. Implications for theory, research, and practice are described.