The power of moral concerns in predicting whistleblowing decisions

Publication date: November 2019Source: Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 85Author(s): James A. Dungan, Liane Young, Adam WaytzAbstractWhistleblowers risk great personal cost to expose injustice. While their actions are sometimes deemed morally courageous, existing evidence that whistleblowers are primarily motivated by moral concerns is mixed. Moreover, little is known about the extent to which moral concerns predict whistleblowing relative to other organizational and situational factors. To address these gaps, we present two studies demonstrating the power of moral concerns in predicting whistleblowing decisions. Study 1 uses a large cross-sectional dataset of federal employees (N = 42,020) to test how moral concerns predict real-world whistleblowing decisions relative to other factors. Study 2 provides a more controlled replication of the association between moral concerns and whistleblowing decisions in an online sample of the U.S. workforce. Results revealed that moral concerns consistently predicted whistleblowing decisions above and beyond other organizational and situational factors. Specifically, whistleblowing decisions were associated with a tradeoff between moral concerns; whereby, concerns for the fair treatment of others beyond one's organization were associated with reporting unethical behavior, while loyalty to one's organization was associated with not reporting unethical behavior. Organizational factors, such as whether the organization ed...

Source: Journal of Experimental Social Psychology - July 25, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research