Title

Encouraging Employees To Report Unethical Conduct Internally: It Takes A Village

Keywords

Coworkers; Ethics; Leadership; Whistle-blowing

Abstract

Via three studies of varying methodologies designed to complement and build upon each other, we examine how supervisory ethical leadership is associated with employees' reporting unethical conduct within the organization (i.e., internal whistle-blowing). We also examine whether the positive effect of supervisory ethical leadership is enhanced by another important social influence: coworkers' ethical behavior. As predicted, we found that employees' internal whistle-blowing depends on an ethical tone being set by complementary social influence sources at multiple organizational levels (both supervisory and coworker levels), leading us to conclude that " it takes a village" to support internal whistle-blowing. Also, this interactive effect was found to be mediated by a fear of retaliation in two studies but not by perceptions of futility. We conclude by identifying theoretical and practical implications of our research. © 2013 Elsevier Inc.

Publication Date

5-1-2013

Publication Title

Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes

Volume

121

Issue

1

Number of Pages

89-103

Document Type

Article

Personal Identifier

scopus

DOI Link

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2013.01.002

Socpus ID

84875253918 (Scopus)

Source API URL

https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/84875253918

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS