Creating an ethogenic organisation: The development and implementation of a whistleblowing policy
Abstract
In spite of supposedly comprehensive protective legislation, evidence suggests that whistleblowers enjoy little effective legal protection. Rather than emphasising the processes needed to support, strengthen and protect the whistleblower, and thereby encouraging whistleblowing, this article explores ways in which whistleblowing could be preâ€empted by institutionalising the spirit of whistleblowing through the creation of what we call an ethogenic organisation. In such an organisation, an organisational culture is established that allows and encourages all employees (including management) to identify and resolve issues of perceived wrongdoing in a way that is beneficial to everybody concerned, and is not driven by process.ÂReferences
Alford, C. F. (2001). Whistleblowers: Broken lives and organizational power. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
British Standards Institute. (2008). Publicly Available Specification 1998: 2008 Whistleblowing Arrangements Code of Practice. London: British Standards Institute.
Carr, I. and Lewis, D. (2010). Combating corruption through employment law and whistleblower protection. Industrial Law Journal, 39, 1â€30.
De Maria, W. (2005). Whistleblower protection: Is Africa ready? Public Administration and Development, 25, 217â€26.
De Maria, W. (2006). Common law – common mistakes? Protecting whistleblowers in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the United Kingdom. International Journal of Public Sector Management, 19 (7), 643â€58.
Ernst and Young. (2007). A survey into fraud risk mitigation in 13 European countries. EYGM Limited.
Hassink, H., de Vries, M., and Bollen, L. (2007). A content analysis of whistle blowing policies of leading European companies. Journal of Business Ethics, 75, 25â€44.
Hunt, G. (1998). Whistleblowing. Encyclopaedia of Applied Ethics, 4, 525â€35.
Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales. (2004). Guidance for audit committees on whistleblowing arrangements. London: Institute of Chartered Accountants.
King, M. (2009). King III report on corporate governance for South Africa: King Committee on Corporate Governance. Johannesburg: Institute of Directors in Southern Africa.
Lewis, D. and Uys, T. (2007). Protecting whistleblowers at work: A comparison of the impact of British and South African legislation, Managerial Law 49, 76â€92.
Miceli, M. P., Near, J. P. and Dworkin, T. M. (2008). Whistleblowing in organizations. New York: Routledge.
Minnaarâ€Van Veijeren, J. (2001). Examining how whistleblowing should form part of an entrenched crime prevention strategy within your organization. Unpublished paper presented at Whistleblowing Conference on 4 and 5 April 2001, Kempton Park, South Africa.
Near, J. P. and Dworkin, T. M. (1998). Responses to legislative changes: Corporate whistleblowing policies. Journal of Business Ethics, 17, 1551â€61.
Ravishankar, L. (2005). Encouraging internal whistleblowing in organizations prepared for the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics’ Business and Organizational Ethics Partnership. [Online]. Available from: http:// www.scu.edu/ethics/publications/submitted/whistleblowing.html, [Last accessed on 30 June 2005].
Rehg, M., Miceli, M., Near, J., and Van Scotter, J. (2008). Antecedents and outcomes of retaliation against whistleblowers: Gender differences and power relationships. Organization Science, 19, 221â€40.
Republic of South Africa. Protected Disclosures Act. (Act No. 26 of 2000). Cape Town: Government Gazette.
Rothschild, J. (2008). Freedom of speech denied, dignity assaulted: What whistleblowers experience in the US. Current Sociology, 56, 884â€903.
Senekal, A. (1999). When deviance becomes sin. KOERS, 64, 443â€64. Thio, A. (1995). Deviant behaviour. New York: Harper Collins.
Uys, T. (2008). Rational loyalty and whistleblowing: The South African context. Current Sociology, 56, 907â€24.
Uys, T. and Senekal, A. (2008). Morality of principle versus morality of loyalty: The case of whistle blowing. African Journal of Business Ethics, 3, 38â€44.
Vandekerckhove, W. (2006). Whistleblowing and organizational social responsibility: A global assessment. Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate.
Wright, E. O. (2010). Envisioning real utopias. London: Verso.
This journal is an open access journal, and the authors and journal should be properly acknowledged, when works are cited.
Authors may use the publisher's version for teaching purposes, in books, theses, dissertations, conferences and conference papers.
A copy of the authors’ publisher's version may also be hosted on the following websites:
- Non-commercial personal homepage or blog.
- Institutional webpage.
- Authors Institutional Repository.
The following notice should accompany such a posting on the website: “This is an electronic version of an article published in the African Journal of Business Ethics, Volume XXX, number XXX, pages XXX–XXX”, DOI. Authors should also supply a hyperlink to the original paper or indicate where the original paper (http://ajobe.journals.ac.za/pub) may be found.
The following Creative Commons license applies:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
