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

尽管举报已被广泛认为是预防和发现企业欺诈的重要手段，但越来越多的人关注组织如何在其公司治理体系中制定和协调举报程序和机构，以鼓励员工举报不道德的商业行为。本研究项目的目的是调查如何完善企业道德计划，以鼓励员工举报观察不法行为。尽管绝大多数组织一直遵循不同监管举措的指导方针，以实现有效的合规和诚信管理，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，如果道德方案的组成部分没有统一，就可能无法促进举报行为，而被视为仅仅是为了减少组织的法律的责任而进行的门面装饰。目前基于观察性实地数据的实证研究很少涉及道德方案对举报的有效性，而且缺乏以下能力：在相同的环境背景下，比较不同机构和政策在举报方面的有效性。因此，我们建议使用实验经济学作为我们的研究方法。通过主要使用Bartuli，Mir Djawadi和法尔（2016）的实验设计，我们能够以自然发生的设置难以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，尽管现有的道德制度可能是由于高层管理人员的战略考虑而内生地采用的，但我们能够在受控条件下外生地改变和操纵这些制度。因此，我们可以设计反事实的情况下，需要的具体政策的因果关系的推论，否则是不可能观察或构建在该领域的举报。该研究项目分为四个子项目。首先，计划建立一个基线设置，在两个不同的组织环境中调查举报倾向，而不需要基于合规和诚信的道德操守方案的任何进一步干预。在第二和第三个子项目中，设计了不同的基于合规和基于诚信的道德干预措施，并将其纳入基线设置，以分别检查其对举报行为的有效性。在最后一个子项目中，我们使用前面的子项目的见解，联合收割机不同的合规为基础的道德干预和诚信为基础的研究联合影响的举报。

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.