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Whistleblowing and employee loyalty summary
Whistleblowers: heroes or disloyal employees
Why whistleblowers should, or should not, be protected
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In the postive light the employee is being loyal to the their values and what they companies values maybe, on the other they can be seen as a disloyal snitch. Disloyalty can also arise when the person blows the whistle for profit, such as the example brought up in Organizational Behavior: A Practical, Problem-Solving Approach, “Dodd-Frank legislation and some regulatory agencies provide incentives for whistleblowers. Some can receive up to 30 percent of any settlement, if regulators collect over $1 million due to the infraction. Bradley Birkenfeld, an ex-banker for UBS, was awarded $104 million for exposing how his bank helped US clients hide money in Swiss accounts. Cheryl Eckard was awarded $96 million for revealing manufacturing flaws …show more content…
In the book Organizational Behavior: A Practical, Problem-Solving Approach an example of this would be VP at Chase Bank, Linda Almonte. As a VP at Chase Bank, Linda Almonte and her team were asked to review more than 20,000 past-due credit card accounts before they were sold to another company. “Almonte 's team reported back to her that nearly 60 percent contained some sort of major error, including discrepancies about the amount or whether the court had indeed ruled for the bank. Concerned, Almonte went up the chain of command, flagging the errors and encouraging management to halt the sale. Instead, the bank fired Almonte and completed the deal. Nobody would hire her, which ruined her professionally and financially.” (Kinicki & Fugate, 2015) This shows the cost of what can happen to a whistle blower who thought she was doing the right thing for her company. It is truly important that people do not underestimate the likelihood and costs of retaliation. Barbara Ettorre wrote in Whistleblowers: Who’s the Real Bad Guy? “the sad fact is that in today 's supposedly enlightened business world, corporate America continues to treat its whistleblowers poorly. The notion persists that it is disloyal and irresponsible to criticize one 's employer, notwithstanding the fact that the company has done wrong.” (p.
...usly shamed, embarrassed, and demeaned their employees. I think this kind of behavior is a way of separating employers from employees. It helps keep employees in line and also adds the benefit of making employers feel good about themselves at the expense of their employees. Demeaning actions prevent employees from organizing or protesting for higher wages or better conditions. It keeps them “in their place” and does not allow them to hope or strive for anything better. In spite of the dehumanization of employees by employers, there are silent rebellions committed by lower class employees such as jokes, gossip, doing other's work, and just in general helping each other out. These are silent protests, they do not change the status quo in any way, that would be too risky for these employees. It is survival and caring in a corporate world that does not care about them.
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act was drafted to encourage and protect whistleblowers from retaliation after the fraud scandal that cause the collapse of Enron in 2001. In a 2010 Senate Report found that “external auditors detected only 4.1 percent of uncovered fraud schemes, “whistleblower tips detected 54.1% of uncovered fraud schemes in public companies” and were thirteen times more effective than external audits” (Turpan, 2016). Whistleblowers serve an important service to the public and are more effective than external audits. The CFAA has been used to by employers to retaliate against employees who act as informants for agencies like Internal Revenue Service or Security Exchange Commission to expose fraud. There employees, not to their financial gain, gather information as evidence of fraud by the company. With a broad interpretation of CFAA, the employee would "exceed their authority" and was "unauthorized" to access the information, therefore allowing the company to hide their illegal
Their organizational initiatives are often self-serving; however, the emerging workforce isn’t motivated by selfish managers. This selfish behavior often turns into unethical conduct. Unethical dealings in the workplace are always wrong. It is crucial to promote ethical behavior. Everyone must understand that once caught, unethical behavior is not just a problem for those directly involved, it is everyone’s problem.
Whistle blowing is a controversial topic in the professional industry. Whistle blowing is the act of speaking out against a fellow colleague or even a friend that has done something non-ethical or illegal in the workplace. A whistleblower raises concerns about the wrongdoing inside of the workplace. Employees hesitate to become a whistleblower because of the idea of becoming a snitch on fellow employees and having a bad rep around the office. This concern was lowered in 1989 with a law called the Whistleblower Protection Act that protects federal government employees in the United States from retaliatory action for voluntarily disclosing information about dishonest or illegal activities occurring at a government organization (whistleblowers.gov).
The term Whistleblower means “An employee who discloses information that s/he reasonably believes is evidence of illegality, gross waste or fraud, mismanagement, abuse of power, general wrongdoing, or a substantial and specific danger to public health and safety. When information is classified or otherwise restricted by Congress or Executive Order, disclosures only are protected as whistleblowing if made through designated, secure channels. (What is a Whistleblower?)” The idea behind whistleblowers is that they believe trying to inform the public of illegal acts within their businesses has the potential to protect the public from wrongdoing. The following studies analyze scholar’s findings on different factors related to whistle blowing as
In contrast, the whistleblowers will be saving the company both from the private and public sector. Also, the company may have been blacklisted into other contracts because of the corruption (Nicol, 2015,
On November 29th, Mary Inman gave us a talk on the topic whistleblowing, which let me know more about the whistleblower activities and the whistleblower protection. According to the definition given by the website whistleblowers international, whistleblowing is someone who reveal the unethical or illegal activities within the company. The person can be current or past employee, or an outside individual who is familiar with the unethical activity. This whistleblower does not need to be U.S. citizen.
First I will be telling you about the pressure of being a “whistleblower”. In Fahrenheit 451 the pressure of being a “whistleblower” is so real, everyone is told to rat out everyone who has a book in their household, if they find out they have a book in the home it is burned to the ground. This is related to our society because we are pressured to do what is right, and part of my belief system is to do what is right and to point out what is wrong. For example if someone were to gossip behind their back I would try to stand up and tell them it is wrong and tell the person what the others said
Which allows employees that have observed any illegal acts or acts that raise concern to be able to report to a company hotline that allows that individual to report with the secrecy of the act without fear of retaliation from the company. Generally, whistleblowers are employees that are dedicated to the company and is a model employee. They do not have any intentions of hurting the company, but rather to improve the company. By having an anonymous reporting method of any situations allows employees to feel that the company values their opinions and actually care what is happening within the company. Another reason that this is a plus is because this keeps everybody honest, since there is an open door policy of reporting any illegal acts. The best way to implement this protocol is to educate employees on what the purpose of the program is. Then train the employees on the simple reporting procedures and certify that everything is clearly written and efficiently understood. When the complaint has reported an Ombudsperson or manager will report the matter to upper management to conduct an internal investigation. When all is done and the complaint is true, then actions will be done to correct the problems. In this case of the secretary being fired for refusal to prepare false expense reports for her boss, there is no need for her to be terminated instead this allows the creation of the whistle-blowing hotline for the company to investigate any illegal acts within the
Workplace deviance is a voluntary unethical behavior that disobeys organizational norms about wrong and right, and in doing so, threatens the wellbeing of the organization, and/or its members(Robinson and Bennett 555-572). According to Robinson and Bennett, “workplace deviances behavior varies along two dimensions: minor versus serious, and interpersonal (deviant behavior directed at other individuals in the organization) versus organizational (deviant behavior directed at the organization)” (555-572). Based on these dimensions it was further divided, into four categories: production deviance (leaving early, wasting resources etc.), property deviance (stealing ,destroying equipment etc.), political deviance (gossiping, favoritism etc.), and personal aggression (verbal abuse ,sexual harassment etc.) (Robinson and Bennett 555-572).According to Robinson and Bennett,workplace deviant behaviors cost U.S. companies approximately between $6 billion and $200 billion annually(555-572). In addition turnover, absences, and illness, and results in poor or lowered productivity, low morale, and litigation ., workplace deviances leads to misuse and loss of time, waste of resources, increases employee(Robinson and Bennett 555-572) .
In many circumstances, employees’ behaviors are likely to follow their leader. Enron’s leadership has been extremely influential due to exemplified charismatic. For example, Heffrey Skilling and Kenneth Lay, CFO and one of executive member in Enron, greatly encourage employees to follow their lead. Their incompetence accounting profession directly affects lover level of employees. Eventually, those manipulating accounting activities affect company collapse. Once leadership has done unethical professional accounting behaviors, unethical acts become accepted. Employees have many reasons for remaining quiet. While Enron still have ethical internal rules, when leadership in Enron did not abide and did not provide corresponding example of employees to follow (Prentice 2003, p. 417). Which eventually make Enron’s become one of the largest corporate scandal frauds.
It could be true that a company is harming a company. Duska argued that organizations cannot rely on loyalty. People do not have obligations of loyalty to companies. Prima facie states that everything is based on the first impression until proven different. (1) Therefore, the loyalty companies are not always viewed as objects of loyalty. Whistleblowing doesn’t need moral justification. Duska compares the idea of loyalty to a company setting barriers and negative attitudes toward the whistleblower. Whistle blowing can cause conflicts with obligations to the employer, and not to reveal confidential information. I think his argument supports the people that whistle blow and their actions are mislabeled, therefore, they are being loyal to their community. Moral justification of right or wrong is hindered by the small amount of loyalty to the
There are number of study regarding to whistleblowing from different aspect of perspectives. A theory is needed in which the nature and parameters of appropriate whistleblowing have to specify in order to articulate coherent understanding of whistleblowing (Hoffman and McNulty, 2010).
They were committing fraud by creative accounting, acting illegally when using insider trading and shredding their documents relevant to the investigation. Next, consider the stakeholders. Anyone who owns stock in the company would suffer, along with every employee. Under the values bullet we can assume that they have none. Greed and power got the better of every one of them.
Whistleblowing is the action of an employee, who reports any unethical violations they see or come across in the firm. Employees should be encouraged to practise whistleblowing, also, organisations should encourage them to act up against unethical behavior.