Study shows vivid language used to assure whistleblowers of protection instead evokes fear

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-04/fau-ssv042616.php

Public Release: 26-Apr-2016
Study shows vivid language used to assure whistleblowers of protection instead evokes fear
Florida Atlantic University

A new study by researchers at Florida Atlantic University and Providence College has found that vivid language intended to assure potential whistleblowers they will be protected from retaliation is instead likely to evoke fear and make them less likely to report misconduct.

"When you start listing all the protections that you're giving them you start raising their awareness of the risks and dangers," said James Wainberg, Ph.D., a professor of accounting at FAU's College of Business and co-author of the study with Stephen Perreault, Ph.D., assistant professor at Providence College School of Business. "It serves to raise their level of anxiety and has the opposite of its intended effect. All the protections are really a list of the things that can go wrong."

It's the first study to demonstrate that promoting explicit whistleblower protections can have the unintended consequence of actually inhibiting reporting of misconduct by intensifying the perceived risk of retaliation.

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A 2014 Global Fraud Study by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners found that whistleblower tips are by far the most common fraud detection method, accounting for more than 42 percent of all cases. That's more than twice the rate of any other detection method. The study also found that employees account for nearly half of all tips that led to the discovery of fraud.

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Rather than describing explicit protections offered from retaliation, they wrote, organizations could instead more explicitly describe the organization's commitment to good corporate governance and ethical behavior.

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