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In the scope of the immense growth of corporate frauds and scandals, reporting unethical practices could be considered as an important mechanism to control them and ultimately improve organizational quality. To this end, this study proposes the conceptual framework comprising the enablers impacting employees' tendencies and behaviors to reporting misdemeanor in the workplace.

Systematic review of literature has been carried out. To understand the complexities among various enablers and to analyze their driving power and contingencies, a modified total interpretive structural modeling (TISM) approach has been adopted.

The findings indicate that enablers such as moral identity (MI) and job satisfaction (JS) having higher driving power (come at the bottom of the hierarchy) are relatively more important. Furthermore, perceived personal cost (PC), moral courage (MC), self-efficacy (SE) and anger have high dependent power of factors. Finally, the paper provides two paths that can lead to whistleblower's ethical decision.

A conceptual framework delivered in this paper requires to test against the field data. However, the conceptual understanding of driving enablers paves the way to top management in recruiting and hiring people in the workplace.

This study represents the first attempt to apply TISM for whistleblowing phenomenon. It provides a comprehensive conceptual framework in order to address the relative importance of various individual enablers in developing reporting tendencies against misdemeanors.

The purpose of this paper is to explore whether official inquiries are an effective method for holding the medical profession to account for failings in the quality and safety of care.

Through a review of the theoretical literature on professions and documentary analysis of key public inquiry documents and reports in the UK National Health Service (NHS) the authors examine how the misconduct of doctors can be understood using the metaphor of professional wrongdoing as a product of bad apples, bad barrels or bad cellars.

The wrongdoing literature tends to present an uncritical assumption of increasing sophistication in analysis, as the focus moves from bad apples (individuals) to bad barrels (organisations) and more latterly to bad cellars (the wider system). This evolution in thinking about wrongdoing is also visible in public inquiries, as analysis and recommendations increasingly tend to emphasise cultural and systematic issues. Yet, while organisational and systemic factors are undoubtedly important, there is a need to keep in sight the role of individuals, for two key reasons. First, there is growing evidence that a small number of doctors may be disproportionately responsible for large numbers of complaints and concerns. Second, there is a risk that the role of individual professionals in drawing attention to wrongdoing is being neglected.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge this is the first theoretical and empirical study specifically exploring the role of NHS inquiries in holding the medical profession to account for failings in professional practice.

This study aims to outline the role of causal attributions in consumer responses to irresponsible corporate behaviour. Specifically, this paper presents a moderated mediation model that explains how four types of perceived motives behind an irresponsible action shape corporate blame and word-of-mouth recommendations.

To test the hypotheses, the study uses data from a large survey assessing consumer reactions to a real case of corporate socially irresponsible behaviour in the banking industry.

The findings show that market-, unethicality- and rogue employee-driven attributions increase corporate blame and subsequently make people more likely to spread negative comments regarding the culprit. The difficult situation of a bank, as a perceived reason for wrongdoing, does not reduce the blame attributed to the irresponsible organisation.

The literature offers little information on the attributions people make following egregious corporate behaviour; however, such cognitions can play an important role in stakeholders’ reactions to wrongdoing. This study therefore extends the understanding of how irresponsibility attributions affect consumers’ responses to misbehaviour. Given the empirical context, the findings might be particularly important for communication and bank managers.

This study aims to examine the effects of peer ethical behavior and individual differences in valuation of fairness vs loyalty on whistleblowing intentions in academic settings. This study also tests the underlying mechanism responsible for the effects of peer behavior on reporting intentions, namely, fear of reprisal.

A survey was conducted with 947 undergraduate students. The model was tested using ordinary least squares regression models followed by bootstrapped mediation analyses.

Results showed that the effects of peer ethical behavior on whistleblowing intentions are mediated by fear of retaliation. Moreover, the findings indicated that, for low-severity transgressions, there is an interactive effect between fear of retaliation and endorsement of fairness over loyalty on whistleblowing intentions.

When the misconduct is seen as minor, a potential whistleblower may understand that the expected costs outweigh the possible benefits of blowing the whistle. In such situations, higher fear of retaliation would undermine the effects of individual’s endorsement of fairness over loyalty on reporting intentions.

As the social environment significantly affects someone’s whistleblowing intentions, there should be visible efforts to improve and to foster an ethical infrastructure in organizations.

As fear of retaliation by peers is one of the most important determinants affecting the decision to report misconduct in general, there must be serious efforts from leaders to mitigate any threat of retaliation to those who come forward.

This work contributes to the discussion about individual and situational antecedents of whistleblowing. More importantly, it sheds light on one potential boundary condition for the influence of the fairness–loyalty tradeoff on whistleblowing decisions: severity of the transgression. The findings provide initial evidence that, for low-severity transgressions, fear of retaliation weakens the positive effects of one’s moral compass in terms of preference for fairness over loyalty on whistleblowing intentions.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the appropriateness of the factors that contribute to building a better whistleblowing environment and culture within an organisation and provide guidelines on how to build a better whistleblowing environment within an organisation.

In total, 592 questionnaires were circulated to 148 accounting firms licensed to carry out statutory audits of public limited companies expecting responses from 4 stakeholders from each entity. Out of the 592 questionnaires, only 148 questionnaires were usable, representing a 25 per cent overall response rate.

It is recommended to encourage a proactive whistleblowing environment by encouraging whistleblowing culture among employees of the organisations. However, there is disagreement among the respondents for some of the selected components that contribute to building a better whistleblowing environment and culture within an organisation.

The findings of this study can be used by the management of the organisations to identify frail areas of whistleblowing initiatives within the organisation and take remedial actions rectify the issues. Authorities can use the findings of the study to implement or amend the existing rules and regulations to encourage whistleblowing.

This study in contrast to the existing studies on determinants of whistleblowing attributes, provides knowledge on developing components/guidelines to encourage whistleblowing attributes and culture.

This paper investigates the challenges and opportunities for the deployment of whistleblowing as an accountability mechanism to curb corruption and fraud in a developing country. Nigeria is the institutional setting for the study.

Adopting an institutional theory perspective and a survey protocol of urban residents in the country, the study presents evidence on the whistleblowing program introduced in 2016. Nigeria’s whistleblowing initiative targets all types of corruption, including corporate fraud.

This study finds that, even in the context of a developing country, whistleblowing is supported as an accountability mechanism, but the intervention lacks awareness, presents a high risk to whistleblowers and regulators, including the risk of physical elimination, and is fraught with institutional and operational challenges. In effect, awareness of whistleblowing laws, operational challenges and an institutional environment conducive to venality undermine the efficacy of whistleblowing in Nigeria.

The study presents a model of challenges and opportunities for whistleblowing in a developing democracy. The authors argue that the existence of a weak and complex institutional environment and the failure of program institutionalization explain those challenges and opportunities. The authors also argue that a culturally anchored and institutionalized whistleblowing program encourages positive civic behavior by incentivizing citizens to act as custodians of their resources, and it gives voice to the voiceless who have endured decades of severe hardship and loss of dignity due to corruption.

Constructive deviance has received increasing attention across the last 20 years. However, because the distinction between constructive and traditional forms of deviance (i.e., destructive) is based on the intent behind the behaviors, it can be difficult to determine which acts are constructive. As an umbrella construct consisting of several forms of deviant acts (e.g., whistle-blowing, employee voice, necessary evils), research into constructive deviance has largely remained focused on the individual behaviors to date. While advancements have been made, this focus has limited the consideration of an overarching understanding of constructive deviance in the workplace. Further, constructs like constructive deviance that straddle the bounds between beneficial and detrimental necessitate the exploration into their antecedents as determined by the employees (i.e., apples), their environments (e.g., barrels), or some combination of the two. The author seeks to advance the research in constructive deviance by proposing a testable model. In which, the author develops an interactionist perspective of the antecedents to reposition constructive deviance as the acts of good employees in restrictive or negative environments. In doing so, the author considers how various aspects of individuals, their organizational environments, and the influence of their leaders interact. The author then develops a multi-stakeholder approach to the outcomes of constructive deviance to consider how the various parties (i.e., organization, coworkers, customers) are expected to respond and how these responses impact the more distal outcomes as well as the likelihood of engaging in future constructive deviance.