Whistleblowing and Mindful Organizing in High-Risk Organizations

Whistleblowing is defined as "the disclosure by organization members (former or current) of illegal, immoral, or illegitimate practices under the control of their employers, to persons or organizations that may be able to effect action" (Near & Miceli 1985; 4). In this paper, we examine whistleblowing as a risk management tool in organizations particularly concerned with safety, security and preparedness, including emergency response organizations. In such organizations, failure to disclose illegal and questionable practices may lead to serious accidents with severe consequences, including loss of lives, not only of employees but also of people who live in proximity to such organizations, or are dependent on treatment by such organizations. Reporting of all kinds of near-accidents and failures is an important part of risk management and knowledge sharing in such organizations, in order to prevent future accidents. Sharing experiences and learning from failures require an organizational climate characterized by openness and trust. Our chosen theoretical framework includes variables pertaining to antecedents (including organizational climate) and consequences of whistleblowing. Preliminary results from a pilot study of N = 106 part-time students who have professional backgrounds within safety, security and preparedness, indicate that there is a negative relationship between organizational climate variables pertaining to the "mindful organizing" framework (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2015) (specifically openness and trust between employees and managers) and observations of wrongdoing at the workplace. Among the subset of participants who had actually observed one or more instances of wrongdoing, we tested whether there was a relationship between organizational climate and actually blowing the whistle. The relationship between organizational climate and the following up of whistleblowing by managers was also tested. However, those results were not significant, due to low N. We argue that a climate supporting voice and whistleblowing, building on openness and trust, both can prevent wrongdoing and promote the reporting of wrongdoing in high-risk organizations. Learning from mistakes and sharing of knowledge in the whistleblowing process might lead to better processes in the future. Implications for further research and practice are discussed.