Keywords

The police student had his practice year in his own hometown, at the police station where he hoped to acquire a job after his studies. Most of his family and friends lived there, and he would like to settle down close to them. He had been fortunate to get the practice year at this station. It provided him an opportunity to become familiar with the work environment where he planned to make a police career. In the beginning, he found it exciting to patrol the streets and neighbourhoods he knew so well. He also enjoyed being in full police uniform when he met friends and acquaintances on the street. After a few weeks, the police student started to work in tandem with one of the veteran police officers, a person he remembered from his teenage years as a calming presence in the streets of the town centre. The two had to intervene in numerous late-night brawls and ended up arresting some of the culprits. The police student thought that the veteran used more brutal methods and language than necessary when making the arrests. He did not like to witness this brutality and tried to talk with the veteran about it. The colleague brusquely dismissed him and claimed that he was too young and inexperienced to know how to deal with these kinds of people. During one encounter in a park, the student was shocked to see the veteran’s aggression towards a drunk man. From his perspective, this behaviour was clearly not in line with the rulebook for responsible police work. The police student had to decide whether to report what he had witnessed, or let it pass. It felt wrong to keep silent. He decided to tell his superior, and thereby, he became a whistleblower (Kvalnes 2022).

Whistleblowing is, “the disclosure by organisation members (former or current) of illegal, immoral, or illegitimate practices under the control of their employers, to persons or organisations that may be able to effect action” (Near and Miceli 1985). The decision about whether to blow the whistle often rests on the trade-off that people make between fairness and loyalty to the organisation or group to which they belong (Dungan et al. 2015). Fairness may draw the potential whistleblowers towards the option of reporting the unethical behaviour, while loyalty to the workplace may hold them back from doing so. The decision-makers can face a conflict between a moral concern for the fair treatment of others and a moral concern for the organisation’s well-being (Dungan et al. 2019). A more complex scenario can be one where even loyalty towards the organisation can trigger a whistleblowing initiative. The whistleblower can assume that it will be in the organisation’s best interest to bring attention to the perceived misconduct. A more adequate description of the situation may then be that the trade-off is between loyalty towards the organisation and loyalty towards oneself. Blowing the whistle can benefit the organisation but become a personal burden for the whistleblower.

Reporting about objectionable practices at work can occur through internal and external channels. Some organisations have established channels for anonymous whistleblowing to reduce the personal risk often involved in bringing attention to critical issues at work. An external unit receives the message and can take further action without revealing the whistleblower’s identity. However, anonymous channels can become a slippery slope, where anyone can report anything about anyone, without any fear of having to stand up and defend the message. The psychological safety level is high because there is no personal risk involved in blowing the whistle. It is an open empirical question whether anonymity will be misused in this manner, or for the most part, lead to healthy disclosure of immoral practices in organisations (Elliston 1982).

The police student who blew the whistle on his veteran colleague became the subject of severe negative responses in the organisation. The recipients of his message took it seriously and decided to reprimand the veteran for his conduct, but the outcome was worse for the whistleblower. He became isolated at work, and soon realised that it would be impossible to get a permanent job at this police station. This was his hometown, and the place where he wanted to settle after graduation, but the responses from colleagues to his initiative of reporting the veteran clarified that he would have to seek employment elsewhere. He was bewildered and frustrated because he had expected others to understand his reasons for blowing the whistle. Instead, colleagues turned their backs on him. He became a lone figure at the station, one who colleagues avoided and excluded from their social networks. The student clearly felt that he was unwelcome in the organisation.

In seminars with police leaders, I have presented this case and invited them to reflect on it. How would they have coped with the situation? What steps should a leader take under such circumstances? They agreed that the student did the right thing in following his conscience and reporting what he interpreted to be unnecessarily brutal conduct from the colleague. He appears to have acted from a sense of fairness and out of loyalty to the organisation, believing that it was necessary to stand up and dissent when witnessing unacceptable police work. Even so, these police leaders have been hesitant to say they would have supported him and taken steps to make him stay. What if he had applied for a job at their police station? Given that he had been the best qualified for a vacancy, would they have offered him the opportunity to start his police career at their station? If so, would they have suggested to share the whistleblowing story with his new colleagues or tried to hide it? These questions have created mixed answers and responses from the police leaders. Some have maintained that the student has proven to be bold, courageous, and just the sort of person needed to raise the quality of police work, while others have claimed that realistically, this person would never be accepted in their work environment where loyalty to the police force and your colleagues is paramount.

Whistleblowing can be seen as a desirable response to perceived injustices or illegalities at work and ways to encourage and support people to blow the whistle can be sought. Highlighting the value of friction and dissent does this. Dungan et al. (2019) suggested that employees could be motivated to engage in whistleblowing if they sense the organisation values constructive dissent within the confines of maintaining group loyalty. Appreciating and celebrating friction can lower the threshold for blowing the whistle.

Another approach can be to establish and encourage a communication climate where it is normal to speak up and address critical issues whenever they occur, and thus, make whistleblowing superfluous. Reporting to an internal or external unit about misbehaviour is usually a last resort, an alternative that occurs when ordinary conversations have not sufficed to make people within the organisation notice the misbehaviour and take it seriously. In an organisation where it is normal to have friendly friction and tolerance for false alarms, and where people sense that it is psychologically safe to challenge each other, the need for whistleblowing is likely minimal. People can address critical issues early, before they grow and become toxic. From this perspective, to establish a channel for anonymous reporting of misconduct is a declaration of failure to establish a communication climate where friendly friction and dissent is normal.

A version of the Johari Window (Luft and Ingham 1961)—discussed in Chap. 5—can illustrate the information asymmetries that can exist between a whistleblower and the leaders in an organisation (Table 14.1).

Table 14.1 Johari Window for whistleblowing
Full size table

When the police student reports the veteran colleague’s brutality, his intention is to bring information from the Blind Spot into the Arena. He has noticed something important that of which the leadership at the police station appears to be unaware. A similar pattern occurs in other whistleblowing cases. The initiatives build on the assumptions that there are some currently unknown facts to the leaders and that the leaders ought to know about them.

Handling Blind Spot issues echoes back to the silence mystery outlined in Chap. 1. It occurs when people are in a position to say something that, from their perspective, is important, but decide to remain silent. They have important information that can enlighten an ongoing discussion and make a significant difference in how decision-makers view their options. Nevertheless, they decide to remain silent. There can be various reasons for the silence. They can be connected to emotions ranging from fear to compassion. If the recipient has a history of responding with anger to critical input from others, people will unlikely raise their voices and share the information that may trigger an angry response. If concerns are already weighing down the recipient, people may reason that more bad news—although highly relevant—will destroy them. Better to keep quiet. The silence means that crucial information remains in the decision-makers’ Blind Spot, opening up for misguided decisions and behaviour.

Whistleblowing is a psychologically complex phenomenon because the recipients of the new information may have preferred that it had remained in their Blind Spot. Their stance may be one of wilful blindness (Marcus 1993; Heffernan 2011). A police chief may not want detailed information about how arrests are made and suspects are treated in the police station. The leadership in an oil and gas company may not want to know exactly how their company won a contract in one of the most corrupt countries in the world. Top management in Volkswagen may not have wanted to know just how their diesel engines were designed to pass the emission tests. A whistleblower may naively believe that people in the hierarchy above them will be grateful for information about such matters, and they may realise too late that they prefer being ignorant to the issue. They have chosen the stance of being wilfully blind.

Whistleblowing usually involves grave personal risk, and many whistleblowers experience that the initiative becomes the start of a downward career spiral. Similar to the police student in the opening example, they regret speaking up. Even so, there are examples of constructive whistleblowing where the initiators do not suffer the typical negative career consequences. Based on observations of various cases, I have formulated three pieces of advice to people who contemplate blowing the whistle (Kvalnes 2022).

  1. 1.

    Act together—form an alliance with other concerned individuals.

  2. 2.

    Make sure that your initiative builds on solid documentation.

  3. 3.

    Take steps to downgrade the importance of the act in your professional life.

Gunsalus (1998) emphasises the first of these and the importance of seeking strength in numbers. If people do not want to become involved, their reasons and justifications matter. They may agree with the potential whistleblower that the issue deserves attention but fear the repercussions of acting. Another possibility is that they disagree and believe that the issue is not important enough to report. The potential whistleblower should carefully consider the arguments of those who are unwilling to join and be willing to revise the assumption that the matter should be brought forward. The range of reasons presented by those who do not want to become involved should matter when deciding on how to move forward (Gunsalus 1998).

The cause of many whistleblowers’ downfall seems to be a neglect of one or more of the three above points. In many instances, (1) the whistleblower stands alone and isolated, (2) people have doubts about the facts to which they are pointing, and (3) the whistleblowing has become the one dramatic incident that dominates the person’s professional and personal life. Recruiters hesitate to hire former whistleblowers and provide them with new job opportunities. That can seem like a harsh and disrespectful stance to take towards someone who has courageously brought attention to misconduct in an organisation. However, the reason for the hesitancy can be that the whistleblowers appear to be obsessed with the whistleblowing incident. It is the most important event in their lives, one that still preoccupies their minds to a high degree.

One notable example provides hope for positive whistleblowing outcomes. Diederik Stapel was a professor of social psychology at Tilburg University in the Netherlands until 2011. That year, he was suspended from his position because of revelations that he had fabricated and manipulated data for research. At least 56 works by Stapel and his coauthors have been retracted as a result of investigations into his activities (Jump 2011). His method for several years had been to collaborate with other researchers and students to develop a research design, and then tell the others to leave the data collection to him. Instead of doing proper field studies and approaching real subjects to gather their answers, he had then filled in questionnaires himself. He would then return to his university with the false data to present and analyse it with his colleagues (Levelt 2012; Stapel 2014).

The process that led to Stapel’s suspension started with a whistleblowing initiative from three PhD students at his university. They had suspicions about the data they received from him. The professor’s narrative about data collection did not add up, and the answers he claimed to have received from his subjects were not convincing. The students made thorough inquiries to check the validity of Stapel’s claims and became convinced that something was wrong. They approached management at the university with their findings. The ensuing investigation documented that Stapel had been fabricating data for several years. He admitted and regretted his conduct.

It seems that the whistleblowers who reported Stapel have avoided negative career consequences. They appear to have followed the pattern outlined above, in (1) forming an alliance and creating strength in numbers before moving forward with their concerns, (2) documenting their claims thoroughly, and (3) avoiding that the whistleblowing became the most important event in their professional lives. Others who contemplate whistleblowing can learn from this example, that careful planning and coordination can create a platform for successful reporting of misbehaviour in one’s organisation.

This chapter has explored the connection between communication climate and whistleblowing. The opening example described how a police student reported his veteran colleague’s brutality and he was punished for it by having his career and life plans disrupted. Reporting about perceived misbehaviour in one’s organisation can be a risky initiative—one that may have damaging career consequences. When detecting objectionable practices, we can be torn between acting from a sense of fairness and acting from a concern for stability in the organisation. Speaking up to draw attention to unfairness can create unrest in the workplace. In a communication climate where it is normal to challenge each other and voice disagreements, initial misbehaviour will less likely develop into objectionable habits and patterns of practice. Friendly friction and dissent can make whistleblowing superfluous.