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If You Can’t Join ‘Em, Report ‘Em: A Model of Ostracism and Whistleblowing in Teams

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When Floyd [Landis] saw that Lance [Armstrong] and [Andrew] Messick were going to continue to ostracize him… the fuse was lit.

—Tyler Hamilton and Daniel Coyle, The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France

Abstract

Unethical behavior coordinated and concealed by teams continues to represent a troubling and all-too-frequent occurrence in organizations. Unfortunately, those who are most knowledgeable about this behavior and thereby best suited to report it to authorities—the complicit members themselves—are susceptible to unique pressures that often discourage them from blowing the whistle. Team members rely on their teammates for relational and other beneficial resources, making it more difficult to potentially break those ties by snitching. However, we argue that the pressure to stay silent is alleviated for members who are ostracized by their team members. Drawing on social exchange theory, we theorize that ostracism decreases positive affect and increases negative affect, decreasing individuals’ communion striving motivation and, in turn, increasing the propensity to blow the whistle. In Study 1, we examined the link between ostracism and whistleblowing utilizing a field sample of diverse employees surveyed over time. In Study 2, we built upon Study 1 and conducted a lab study to examine affect and communion striving motivation as serial mediators. Results were generally supportive of our arguments, although we did not find support for the mediating effect of negative affect.

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Notes

  1. Throughout this paper, positive and negative affect refer to “feeling states” (Barsade and Gibson 2007, p. 37), which are short-term affective experiences. We view positive and negative affect as transient emotional states that are “elicited by a particular target or cause, often include physiological reactions and action sequences, and are relatively intense and short-lived” (Barsade and Gibson 2007, p. 37). This follows other investigations of the relationship between emotions and whistleblowing (Gundlach et al. 2003; Henik 2008). We are not referring to the trait-like aspects of positive and negative affect.

  2. We are not claiming that all unethical behaviors should be reported—whistleblowing is a complex issue that involves many factors, such as the degree of potential harm, type of wrongdoing, and the magnitude of consequences (e.g., Chen and Lai 2014; Jones 1991).

  3. While everyone in this sample listed something, responses to the question about the types of misconduct witnessed yielded a variety of answers. We disqualified participants who provided responses to this question that were non-sensical or not reflective of unethical behavior (e.g., “good,” “help,” “ego”). Participants who provided responses including names of specific individuals, but no information regarding the type of misconduct witnessed, were also deleted from the final dataset.

  4. In addition to these controls, we also measured other traits that potentially influence the relationship between ostracism and whistleblowing—trait positive affect, trait negative affect, and narcissism using scales by Watson and Clark (1999) and Ames et al. (2006), respectively. Adding these control variables did not influence the results, which are available upon request from the first author.

  5. As an additional robustness test, we also included number of misconduct acts witnessed as an additional control variable when examining the relationship between ostracism and whistleblowing behavior; our conclusions remained unchanged—ostracism continued to be positively related to whistleblowing behavior (b = .07, SE = .02, p = .007).

  6. We ran supplemental analyses to determine whether the results were influenced by the severity of the observed unethical acts. To code this, following prior definitions and measures of severity (e.g., Jones 1991; Singhapakdi et al. 1996), we asked an MBA student to code all of the unethical acts observed on a 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree) scale in response to the prompt: “The overall harm (if any) done as a result of this person’s action would be very large.” We then created a variable representing the average severity of unethical acts observed. When we entered this term in the regression along with ostracism predicting whistleblowing behavior, severity of acts observed was not a significant predictor of whistleblowing (b = .07, SE = .06, ns), but ostracism (b = .07, SE = .02, p < .05) continued to have a significant effect. Further, there was no interaction between the two terms in predicting whistleblowing (b = -.05, SE = .04, ns). This indicates that severity of the unethical acts observed did not play a significant role in our model. We thank an anonymous reviewer for this point.

  7. Although a total of 128 students participated in our study, we removed 19 participants (85.2% retention rate) from our final dataset because they indicated suspicion during the debrief that they were not working with real teammates during the study. Another participant was removed from the dataset because they did not complete the survey measures.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Organizational Studies, Anderson School of Management, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, 87106, USA

    Trevor M. Spoelma

  2. Department of Management, Mays Business School, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, 77843, USA

    Nitya Chawla

  3. Department of Management and Organizations, Eller College of Management, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, 85718, USA

    Aleksander P. J. Ellis

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  1. Trevor M. Spoelma
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  3. Aleksander P. J. Ellis
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Correspondence to Trevor M. Spoelma.

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Spoelma, T.M., Chawla, N. & Ellis, A.P.J. If You Can’t Join ‘Em, Report ‘Em: A Model of Ostracism and Whistleblowing in Teams. J Bus Ethics 173, 345–363 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-020-04563-9

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