Looking into why this type of whistleblowing is one of the most stigmatized and persecuted kinds of whistleblowing may provide insight as to why the legal and corporate changes related to the treatment of whistleblowers and the issues they bring to light have been so monumental. To begin, researchers Waytz et al. of Northwestern University and Boston College found that while there has been vast existing research looking into the “structural and organizational factors that influence whistleblowing”, which includes things like “the professional status of whistleblowers, organizational support for whistleblowing, and the type of behavior that people deem unethical and therefore reportable,” there was a lack of research investigating the psychological determinants of whistleblowing (Waytz et al.). Through a further review of available literature and their actual experimental research, they found that the tradeoff between the moral values of fairness and loyalty was a significant psychological determinant for people’s willingness to blow the whistle and they were able to create a predictive model for the level of willingness based on a fairness–loyalty tradeoff (Waytz et al.).
Returning to the lens of corporate whistleblowing and the relation of these psychological determinants to extreme stigmatization and persecution of this kind of whistleblowing, however, it becomes clear how these psychological factors play out in an organization like a corporation or business, especially in settings where cultural norms value the collective over the individual and where the belief of “not biting the hand that feeds you” prevails over issues of unfairness. Even though loyalty may be observed to be very important to human morals and social relationships, as Waytz et al. explain, fairness sometimes trumps this moral and the relationship of a tradeoff between these two moral values act as a determinant that can cause people to do certain things out of retributive fairness and evident disloyalty (Waytz et al.).
When corporate whistleblowers take this decision to bring the issues they want to be revealed and sometimes punished to a third party, they can be seen to effectively “bite the hand that feeds them” and not many people in these organizations that are conducting or even allowing the issues that the whistleblower has deemed to be something needed to be revealed take lightly to this whistleblowing which can be seen as retributive disloyalty in the form of “tattling” or “snitching” by a whistleblower to escape these situations in a more relatively unscathed manner. Because many people hold disloyalty in such a negative light, even when it could have been for an overarching beneficial cause, it could be deduced that perhaps this specific type of whistleblowing is one of the most persecuted and stigmatized forms in the world.
However, this being said, corporate whistleblowers have brought a lot of good through their sacrifices to bring certain things to light that may have otherwise remained hidden. According to the National Whistleblower Center, when it comes to whistleblowing focused on economic crime, “While professional auditors were only able to detect 19% of the frauds on private corporations, whistleblowers exposed 43%" and "Executives surveyed estimated that the whistleblowers saved their shareholders billions of dollars" ("Corporate Whistleblowers"). Along with bringing crime and fraud to light, they've also brought the power of information to the general public to better hold large corporations accountable for their actions with better ethics and more responsibility. Many corporations today have their own policies relating to whistleblowers within their entities so that these issues can be solved at the root and so that these people can have a safe space to bring certain issues to light.
Citations:
“Corporate Whistleblowers.” National Whistleblower Center, National Whistleblower Center, 19 Apr. 2021, www.whistleblowers.org/know-your-rights/corporate-whistleblowers/.
Waytz, Adam, et al. “The Whistleblower's Dilemma and the Fairness–Loyalty Tradeoff.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 49, no. 6, 2013, pp. 1027–1033., doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2013.07.002.
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