The effect of perceived legal and organizational support on whistleblowing the organizational violations in the banking industry

One of the most important ways to prevent the spread of corruption and fraud, both at the macro and organizational levels, is whistleblowing. However, whistleblowing has not been never simple action, and whistleblowers are constantly facing pressure, threats, harassment, and even revenge. Therefore, they are required to receive effective and appropriate organizational and legal support.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK:

Various studies have mentioned different incentives and barriers to whistleblowing. One of the key factors in encouraging employees to disclose violations is perceived organizational support. If employees feel that the organization supports their disclosure actions, this motivation will help them overcome other barriers and whistle. But the factor that has received less attention in this regard, especially in Iran, is the legal protections perceived by the employees. Due to the ignorance of employees about the legal consequences of whistling in Iran, probably one of the most important obstacles to whistleblowing is the lack of protection by law. Therefore, the current research deals with both organizational and legal support and examines their role in persuading employees to expose the organization's violations. Therefore, the current research examines the effect of perceived legal and organizational support on employees' whistleblowing intentions. The whistleblowing intentions comprised six types of offenses including theft, wasting organizational resources, mismanagement, safety issues, sexual harassment, discrimination, and deliberate violation of the law.

The current research is an applied study based on the survey method. The statistical population encompassed all the employees of private banks in Iran. Due to the uncertainty of the statistical population volume, according to Morgan's table, the online questionnaire was distributed among 384 employees of private banks. The questionnaire's reliability was approved using Cronbach's Alpha coefficient, and its construct validity was assessed by confirmatory factor analysis.

The skewness and kurtosis values for all the variables were from +2 to -2, confirming their normality of distribution. Results for the correlation test indicated that organizational support and legal support were significantly correlated, but there was no significant correlation between whistle intention with legal and organizational support. Detailed results showed that the level of perceived legal and organizational support and whistleblowing intention was almost low. Structural equation modeling was conducted in Amos software to test the research hypotheses. Hypothesis testing indicated that organizational and legal support significantly affected whistle intention. Furthermore, research results indicated a significant difference in whistle intention for different types of violations.

CONCLUSIONS & SUGGESTIONS:

This study had a quantitative approach to employees' views on support and their willingness to whistle. Given the relative novelty of this issue, especially at the organizational level, it can certainly be useful and interesting to adopt a qualitative approach and discover deeper motivations of employees. The present study did examine the employees' behavioral intentions but not their actual behavior. Future studies are suggested to examine the actual whistleblowing behavior by adopting a comparative approach. In general, there is a lack of studies to explain the general position of organizational whistling in both the private and public sectors of the country, and there are no reliable statistics about whistling corruption by employees and the fate of whistleblowers.