Abstract
The increase in whistleblowing to a regulator or media has sparked organizational efforts to keep whistleblowing internal to minimize the risk of exposure across various sectors and geographical contexts. However, it is less clear how organizations can make their internal whistleblowing system trustworthy for their internal stakeholders. Research on trust in organizations rarely considers how trustworthiness is signaled in complex organizational situations. In internal whistleblowing channels and procedures, we demonstrate that signaling trustworthiness involves multiple attributions of trustworthiness (ability, benevolence, integrity, transparency, identification) as well as multiple internal stakeholders (workers, middle managers, and top management). This makes whistleblowing an ideal case-in-point for investigating interactions between trustworthiness attributions across stakeholders and how these change across time. This article examines a specific critical issue: how operators of whistleblowing channels attempt to signal trustworthiness through a sequence of interactions with multiple trustors. Our research comprises interviews with 30 operators of internal whistleblowing channels and consultants from four organizations from different sectors (engineering, banking, health care and public administration). Our findings allow us to theorize temporality in signaling trustworthiness of new organizational practices. We suggest that a fundamental ambiguity and contradiction underlies the trustworthiness of internal whistleblowing channels. Within the limited organizational mandate of those who operate whistleblowing channels, this ambiguity is experienced as synchronic and diachronic tensions, requiring specific approaches on the part of actors involved.
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