An Investigation of Misreporting Choice, Team Membership, and Task Similarity on Whistleblowing Decisions

Abstract

Individuals in their roles at work may have the opportunity to commit fraud. They may also be in a position to witness the occurrence of fraud in the workplace. In this study, we examine how individuals' prior decision to commit fraud influences their subsequent decision to whistleblow on another person when (1) the person is in the same team as them or (2) the other person is committing fraud on the same/different task as they did. With two between-subject experiments, we find that individuals who decided to commit fraud are less likely to whistleblow on another fraudster than individuals who decided not to commit fraud. We also find that individuals are more likely to whistleblow on other fraudsters who belong to the same team (task) as them than on fraudsters on a different team (task). The results suggest that heightened team identification can be a powerful means to accentuate whistleblowing. Data Availability: Data are available upon request.