An Experimental Approach for the Study of Effective Compliance and Integrity Measures Improving Whistleblowing Behaviors

研究改善举报行为的有效合规和诚信措施的实验方法

• 批准号: 389481270
• 负责人: Dr. Behnud Mir Djawadi
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Department of Economics
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Research Grants
• 财政年份: 2017
• 资助国家: 德国
• 起止时间: 2016-12-31 至 2020-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/389481270?language=en
• 关键词: Experimental; Approach; Study; Effective; Compliance

Even though whistleblowing is now widely recognized as an important approach to prevent and detect corporate fraud there is a growing interest how organizations have to develop and align whistleblowing procedures and institutions within their corporate governance system to encourage employees to report unethical business practices.The objective of this research project is to investigate how corporate ethics programs have to be refined to encourage employees to report observed wrongdoing. Although the vast majority of organizations have been following guidelines of different regulatory initiatives for effective compliance and integrity management there is only limited knowledge to what extent specific characteristics of these programs influence employees behaviors to blow the whistle. Consequently, ethics programs which are enrolled without alignment of its components may fail to promote whistleblowing behaviors and be perceived as mere window-dressing to reduce the legal liability of the organization.Besides the few conceptual works on organizational ethics programs in general, the current empirical research based on observational field data is scarce on the effectiveness of ethics programs on whistleblowing and further lacks the ability to compare the effectiveness of different institutions and policies on whistleblowing within the same environmental setting. We therefore propose the use of experimental economics as the methodological approach for our research. By mainly using the experimental design of Bartuli, Mir Djawadi and Fahr (2016), we are able to control decision environments in ways that are hard to duplicate with the use of naturally occurring settings. This control allows for the testing of precise predictions derived from game-theoretic and (behavioral-) economic models. Moreover, whereas existing ethics institutions might be adopted endogenously due to strategic considerations by the top management, we are able to exogenously change and manipulate these institutions under controlled conditions. Thus, we can design the counterfactual situations needed for causal inferences of specific policies on whistleblowing which otherwise are impossible to observe or construct in the field. The research project is divided into four subprojects. First, it is planned to create a baseline setting in which the inclination to blow the whistle is investigated in two different organizational climates without any further interventions of compliance-based and integrity-based ethics programs. In the second and third subproject, different compliance-based and integrity-based ethics interventions are designed and incorporated into the baseline setting to examine their effectiveness on whistleblowing behavior, respectively. In the final subproject, we use the insights of the preceding subprojects to combine different compliance-based and integrity-based ethics interventions for studying joint effects on whistleblowing.

尽管举报现在被广泛认为是预防和发现公司欺诈的重要方法，但组织如何在其公司治理系统中制定和协调举报程序和制度，以鼓励员工举报不道德的商业行为，人们越来越感兴趣。本研究项目的目的是调查如何完善企业道德计划，以鼓励员工报告发现的不法行为。尽管绝大多数组织都遵循不同的法规倡议的指导方针，以有效地遵守和完整性管理，但这些计划的具体特征在多大程度上影响了员工的举报行为，这方面的知识有限。因此，没有与其组成部分保持一致的道德计划可能无法促进举报行为，并被视为仅仅是为了减少组织的法律责任而装点门面。除了少数关于组织伦理项目的概念性研究外，目前基于观察现场数据的实证研究很少涉及道德项目对举报的有效性，并且缺乏比较同一环境下不同制度和政策对举报有效性的能力。因此，我们建议使用实验经济学作为我们研究的方法论方法。通过主要使用Bartuli， Mir Djawadi和Fahr（2016）的实验设计，我们能够以难以使用自然发生的设置复制的方式控制决策环境。这种控制允许测试来自博弈论和（行为）经济模型的精确预测。此外，由于高层管理人员的战略考虑，现有的伦理制度可能会被内源性采用，而我们能够在可控的条件下外源性地改变和操纵这些制度。因此，我们可以设计反事实情况，以便对具体的举报政策进行因果推断，否则这些情况在现场是不可能观察或构建的。这个研究项目分为四个子项目。首先，计划创建一个基线设置，其中在两种不同的组织环境中调查举报倾向，而不需要任何基于合规性和基于诚信的道德计划的进一步干预。在第二和第三个子项目中，设计了不同的基于合规性和基于诚信的道德干预措施，并将其纳入基线设置，分别检验其对举报行为的有效性。在最后一个子项目中，我们利用前面子项目的见解，将不同的基于合规性和基于诚信的道德干预措施结合起来，研究对举报的共同影响。