The Impact of Ethical Culture Maturity on Whistleblowing

This chapter provides insight into the effect of organizational culture, as defined by its mode of ethics management and resultant ethical culture maturity, on an organization’s willingness to encourage employees to blow the whistle. Organizational culture entails shared assumptions that guide employees by defining appropriate behavior in the workplace. It provides employees with a sense of identity and affects the way employees interact with each other and other stakeholders. It may also influence how much employees identify with their organization—an important motivation for whistleblowers. Organizations are in different phases of maturity insofar as ethics management is concerned. Rossouw and Vuuren (2017, van Vuuren, n.d.) provide a classification system whereby an organization’s ethics management maturity, and thus its ethical organizational culture, is shown to be a function of the current beliefs and attitudes toward ethics in the organization. In terms of this model, the Modes of Ethics Management Model, the extent to which ethics and whistleblowing are viewed as important for the organization and its sustainability determines whether it has an ethics management function and whistleblowing facilities and, if it does, how much is invested in its mandate. The ‘size’ of the investment is reflected in the dedication, time, and monetary and human resources allocated to the ethics function and whistleblowing management program. A mode (immoral, reactive, compliance, integrity, and totally aligned) can be described as the preferred manner of an organization to manage its ethics. The preferred mode reflects the decision its leaders make to ignore ethics and to act unethically, or to actively deal with ethics in an explicit manner. The mode is observable and has distinct properties that display the organization’s strategy to manage or ignore ethics and whistleblowing reports. Each of these strategies involve the implementation of several ethics management interventions, that includes whistleblowing (as a reactive intervention) (Rossouw and Vuuren, 2017). In strong ethical cultures employees feel that they can rely on the support of management and colleagues for blowing the whistle. They are also confident that their reports will be taken seriously, be addressed in the appropriate manner and that they will not be victimized for speaking up. In weak ethical cultures employees are fearful of blowing the whistle for several reasons. All these issues will be addressed in this submission. Typically, no whistleblowing facilities exist in the immoral mode, while organizations in the reactive mode may have such facilities. Rules-based organizations have whistleblowing facilities with the aim of preventing unethical behavior. Integrity mode organizations aim to promote ethical behavior, and whistleblowing facilities are only used as a last resort to expose gross malpractice. Totally aligned organizations may have limited whistleblowing facilities because ethical issues are discussed and solved before whistleblowing becomes necessary. Organizations in the compliance mode, the integrity mode, and the totally aligned mode view ethical standards and management as a business imperative. It is in these organizations that unethical behavior is unacceptable, and where there is a need from the organization’s side to be informed of such conduct in its midst. These organizations therefore avail avenues to employees to enable them to alert the organization of unethical conduct. A strong ethical organizational culture that creates an environment that facilitates the disclosure of organizational misconduct should be established. Research by Groenewald and Vorster (2019) has found that employees observe less unethical conduct in organizations with a strong ethical culture. In addition, it was found that employees report unethical behavior more in strong cultures where they know their issues will be addressed.