Voice And Whistleblowing In Organizations

Employees in organizations face countless daily situations in which they make a choice to speak up, exercise voice, or remain silent. Too many choose to remain silent. Others only tell supervisors what they want to hear, becoming Šyes� men and women. E

Whistleblowing on organisational wrongdoing is becoming increasingly prevalent. What aspects of the person, the context, and the transgression relate to whistleblowing intentions and to actual whistleblowing on corporate wrongdoing. Employee whistleblowing -- loosely, the disclosure to a person or public body, outside normal channels and management structures, of information concerning unsafe, unethical or illegal practices -- has emerged as a central issue in debates over quality and safety in organisations. Whistleblowing policies have been mandated and promoted for many years by employers and professional associations -- aimed particularly at securing safe and effective services. Yet there is a disconnect between whistleblowing policies in theory and how such arrangements work in practice. Voice and Whistleblowing in Organisations examines the decision to speak out in organisations or to keep silent, the roles of fear and courage, and why increasing valid information and truth is dominant to individual and organisational health. It aims to demonstrate the relevance of voice and silence -- that is, whether employees contribute or withhold information, ideas, views and/or concerns at work -- for the sustainable development of individuals, organisations and societies. It also identify emerging issues that include the relationship between voice and silence, how they may manifest in organisations, their manifold antecedents inside and beyond organisational boundaries, their potentially positive and negative effects for internal and external stakeholders. Whistleblowing then, is often fraught with rival interpretations and always happens in a deeply cultural and highly situated organisational context. Organisational policies thus need very careful design, implementation and enacting to protect those raising legitimate concerns as well as offering support in cases of fallout from more vexatious whistleblowing. The text, containing chapters by international researchers, examines the causes and consequences of exercising voice and ways individuals and organisations can support voice in the workplace. Including contributors who are internationally recognised academics from a range of countries, this book will prove to be an essential resource for scholars and students in the field of human resource management.

This is a research-based book on whistle-blowing in organizations. The three noted authors describe studies on this important topic and the implications of the research and theory for organizational behavior, managerial practice, and public policy. In the past few years there have been critical developments, including corporate scandals, which have called public attention to whistle-blowing and have led to the first comprehensive federal legislation to protect private sector whistle-blowers (the Sarbanes-Oxley Act). This book is the first to integrate these new developments in an analytic and empirically grounded approach to whistle-blowing in organizations.

Are employees encouraged to speak up or to pipe down? Do they share ideas openly or do they remain silent in ways that are hurtful to individuals and harmful to the functioning of their organizations? This collection of 12 essays addresses these and related issues from a variety of scholarly perspectives.

Among the most fundamental decisions made in the workplace includes whether or not to express their ideas and concernsor even if it is possible to do so. Voice and Silence in Organizations is poised to become a classic as the first book of its kind on this topic, Presenting a collection of 14 original essays that address this question from a wide variety of scholarly perspectives with chapters by highly regarded psychologists, sociologists and management scholars from around the world offer new conceptual insights and empirical findings that promise to become valuable contributions to this burgeoning area.The text is organized into five major sections and covers; basic concepts (including an overview of voice and silence in organizations); psychological processes involved with voice and silence (including the attributional processes that give them meaning and their roles as defense mechanisms); antecedents and consequences of voice and silence in organizations; counterproductive ways in which silence is used (such as a means of aggression and social ostracism) The monograph concludes with an analysis of what the contributions as a whole reveal about this field and the challenges it faces for the future.

In a dark departure from our standard picture of whistleblowers, C. Fred Alford offers a chilling account of the world of people who have come forward to protest organizational malfeasance in government agencies and in the private sector. The conventional story—high-minded individual fights soulless organization, is persecuted, yet triumphs in the end—is seductive and pervasive. In speaking with whistleblowers and their families, lawyers, and therapists, Alford discovers that the reality of whistleblowing is grim. Few whistleblowers succeed in effecting change; even fewer are regarded as heroes or martyrs.Alford mixes narrative analysis with political insight to offer a frank picture of whistleblowing and a controversial view of organizations. According to Alford, the organization as an institution is dedicated to the destruction of the moral individualist. Frequently, he claims, the organization succeeds, which means that the whistleblowers are broken, unable to reconcile their actions and beliefs with the responses they receive from others. In addition to being mistreated by organizations, whistleblowers often do not receive support from their families and communities. In order to make sense of their stories, Alford claims, some whistleblowers must set aside the things they have always believed: that loyalty is larger than the herd instinct, that someone in charge will do the right thing, that the family is a haven from a heartless world. Alford argues that few whistleblowers recover from their experience, and that, even then, they live in a world very different from the one they knew before their confrontation with the organization.

Whistleblowing, Communication and Consequences offers the first in-depth analysis of the most publicized, and morally complex, case of whistleblowing in recent European history: the Norwegian national lottery, Norsk Tipping. With contributions from the whistleblower himself, as well as from key voices in the field, this book offers unique perspectives and insights into not only this fascinating case, but into whistleblowing and wrongdoing in organizations more broadly. An international team of scholars use fourteen different theoretical lenses to show the complex and multi-faceted nature of whistleblowing. The book begins with an ethnographic account by the whistleblower story and proceeds into an analysis of the literature and conceptual topics related to that whistleblowing incident to present the lessons that can be learnt from this extreme example of institutional failure. This fascinating, complex, and multi-theoretical book will be of great interest to scholars, students and industry leaders in the areas of public relations, corporate communication, leadership, corporate social responsibility, whistleblowing and organizational resistance.

This book addresses the contemporary aspects of employee voice through theoretical and practical analysis. In addition to case studies of employee voice in the workplace, it also looks at emerging forms of voice associated with the use of technology such as social media. Because of the breadth of the concept of employee voice, the focus of the book lends itself to an international perspective on employment relations and human resources management – analyses and experiences drawn from one country will be usefully considered or applied in relation to others.