Uncovering the relationship between whistleblowing and organizational identity. Some preliminary evidence from Italian publicly owned universities

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/IJPSM-02-2019-0030
• Pages: 94-112
• Date: 23 November 2019
• Published date: 23 November 2019
• Author: Rocco Palumbo,Rosalba Manna
• Subject Matter: Public policy & environmental management,Politics,Public adminstration & management

Uncovering the relationship

between whistleblowing and

organizational identity

Some preliminary evidence from Italian

publicly owned universities

Rocco Palumbo

Department of Management and Law,

University of Rome Tor Vergata, Rome, Italy, and

Rosalba Manna

Department of Management and Quantitative Studies,

University “Parthenope”of Naples, Naples, Italy

Abstract

Purpose –Whistleblowing –i.e. the employees’decision to report illegal, immoral and/or illegitimate

practices performed by peers, supervisors and/or subordinates –involves a contestation of the existing

organizational power. Therefore, it challenges the whistleblower’s identification with the organization.

Nevertheless, whistleblowing has been rarely related to organizational identity. The purpose of this paper is

to fill this gap, investigating employees’whistleblowing intentions in the context of higher education.

Design/methodology/approach –A quantitative, exploratory analysis concerning the whistleblowing

episodes that occurred in the whole population of Italian publicly owned universities and higher education

institutions was performed (n¼69). Secondary data about whistleblowing were retrieved from the annual

reports arranged by the supervisor for the prevention of corruption and the promotion of transparency.

Findings –Most of Italian publicly owned higher education institutions did not experience whistleblowing.

Conversely,less than a quarter of the samplereported at least ones whistleblowingprocedure. The homogeneity

of organizationalidentity seemed to discouragethe willingness of academicemployees to report organizational

wrongdoings. ICT-based and anonymized whistleblowing systems were found to support the propensity of

academics to blow thewhistle.

Practical implications –Tailored interventions are needed to addressthe interplay between organizational

identity and academic employees’whistleblowing intentions. The culture of silence predominating in

institutionscharacterized by a hegemonicorganizational identityshould be overwhelmed.Prevention measures

intended to guarantee the whistleblower’s anonymity through the use of ICT-based platforms are useful to

support the academicemployees’willingness t ob low the whistle in case of organizational miscond uct.

Originality/value –This is one of the first attempts to investigate the interplay between organizational

identity and whistleblowing in public sector organizations.

Keywords Whistleblowing, Higher education, Organizational identity, Organizational integrity,

Organizational wrongdoings

Paper type Research paper

1. Introduction and study rationale

In the last few years,the challenges faced by public sector organizations increasedin size and

urgency (Van Dooren et al.,2015).Inter alia, the growing constraints on publicfinances have

raised doubts andconcerns about the sustainabilityof traditional management models rooted

in the public realm (Barbera et al., 2016). The so-said “[…] managerialistic enlightenmen t”

(Diefenbach,2009, p. 892) has been proposedas an approach to deal with this criticalsituation:

it has deeply reshapedthe way public sector entities are organized and managed, introducing

business-like models in handling public affairs (Hyndman and Lapsley, 2016).

The shift toward a new public management model inspired to the ethos of private sector

companies has beenargued to produce several side effects on thepublic sector organizations’

International Journal of Public

Sector Management

Vol. 33 No. 1, 2020

pp. 94-112

© Emerald PublishingLimited

0951-3558

DOI 10.1108/IJPSM-02-2019-0030

Received 1 February 2019

Revised 2 July 2019

17 October 2019

Accepted 1 November 2019

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:

www.emeraldinsight.com/0951-3558.htm

94

IJPSM

33,1

ability to accomplish their institutional mandate of generating and distributing public value

across the community (Simonet, 2015; Hood and Dixon, 2015). More specifically, it has been

claimed that, while it may determine more effective performance management tools

(De Vries and Nemec, 2013) and better financial results (Monteduro, 2014), the mixture of

public interests with management techniques borrowed from the private realm entails an

alteration of the values that inspire the activities of public sector entities (Van Wart, 1998).

In other words, the contamination of public values with private-based management

approaches is thought to impair the social sustainability of the public service system

(Bryson et al., 2014).

The scientific literature has proposed a wide array of solutions intended to prevent the

decay of public sector organizations’ability to produce meaningful value for the community

which is engendered by the advent of managerialistic enlightenment (see, among others:

O’Flynn, 2007; Brandsen et al., 2018). Whistleblowing is arising as an effective tool to

facilitate the detection of public values’deterioration and to arrange timely interventions

aimed at restoring the integrity of public sector organizations (Ciasullo et al., 2017).

In general terms, whistleblowing involves the intention of an employee to take a formal

action (i.e. to blow the whistle) when encountering illegal, immoral and/or illegitimate

practices performed by peers, supervisors and/or subordinates during their everyday

working activities (Near and Miceli, 1985; Pillay et al., 2017). From this standpoint,

whistleblowing intrinsically implies a dissenting act of public accusation, which is

characterized by a form of disloyalty of the accuser toward the accused members of the

organization ( Jubb, 1999). It implicates the emergence of a value conflict between different

members of the organization, influencing the processes of organizational identification

(Skålén, 2004; Berndtsson et al., 2018). Alongside producing emotional trauma and

psychological distress for the whistleblower (Sprague, 1993), the whistleblowing act leads to

a disidentification with the organization, that may have momentous implications at both the

individual and the collective levels (Bok, 1980).

Scholars have tried to shed light on the conceptual attributes whichunderpin whistleblowing

(Culiberg and Mihelič, 2017). Moreover, different attempts have been performed to unravel the

determinants and consequences of whistleblowing (Philmore et al., 2017; Previtali and Cerchiello,

2018). However, to the best of the authors’knowledge, there is limited agreement about the

relationship between employees’whistleblowing intention and organizational identity. This is

surprising, since whistleblowing basically implies a “[…] contestation of truth and power in the

workplace”(Weiskopf and Tobias-Miersch, 2016, p. 1621), questioning the identification of the

whistleblower with the organization.

The article contributes to an identified gap in the scientific knowledge, by adding

information to the debate about the role of organizational identity in influencing the

employees’whistleblowing intention. An empirical analysis involving the whole population

of Italian publicly owned universities and higher education institutions allowed us to collect

some evidence about the interplay between academic employees’whistleblowing intentions

and organizational identity. This study was conceived as an attempt to provide an answer

to the following research questions:

RQ1. Does organizational identity affect the employees’whistleblowing intentions,

stimulatingtheir willingness to challengeexisting truth and power in the workplace?

RQ2. What kind of organizational interventions could be designed to steer the interplay

between organizational identity and employees’whistleblowing intentions?

The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 provides some details about the conceptual

framework which inspired the research strategy and design. Section 3 shows an overview of

the study methodology: first, it describes how organizational identity was operationalized

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