Signalling Trustworthiness of Internal Whistleblowing Channels in Organizations: Temporality matters!
研究了组织如何通过内部举报渠道向员工、中层管理者和高层管理者传递可信度信号，发现可信度信号涉及多种属性且随时间变化，基于对30位运营者和顾问的访谈。
The increase in whistleblowing to a regulator or media has sparked organizational efforts to keep whistleblowing internal to minimize the risk of exposure across various sectors and geographical contexts. However, it is less clear how organizations can make their internal whistleblowing system trustworthy for their internal stakeholders. Research on trust in organizations rarely considers how trustworthiness is signalled in complex organizational situations. In internal whistleblowing channels and procedures, we demonstrate that signalling trustworthiness involves multiple attributions of trustworthiness (ability, benevolence, integrity, transparency, identification) as well as multiple internal stakeholders (workers, middle managers and top management). This makes whistleblowing an ideal case in point for investigating interactions between trustworthiness attributions across stakeholders and how these change across time. This article examines a specific critical issue: how operators of whistleblowing channels attempt to signal trustworthiness through a sequence of interactions with multiple trustors. Our research comprises interviews with 30 operators of internal whistleblowing channels and consultants from four organizations from different sectors (engineering, banking, health care and public administration). Our findings allow us to theorize temporality in signalling trustworthiness of new organizational practices. We suggest that a fundamental ambiguity and contradiction underlies the trustworthiness of internal whistleblowing channels. Within the limited organizational mandate of those who operate whistleblowing channels, this ambiguity is experienced as synchronic and diachronic tensions, requiring specific approaches on the part of actors involved.