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

尽管举报人现在被广泛认为是预防和发现公司欺诈的重要方法，但人们越来越感兴趣的是，组织如何在其公司治理系统中制定和协调举报人程序和机构，以鼓励员工举报不道德的商业行为。本研究项目的目标是调查如何改进企业道德计划，以鼓励员工举报所观察到的不当行为。尽管绝大多数组织一直在遵循不同监管倡议的指导方针，以实现有效的合规和诚信管理，但人们对这些计划的具体特征在多大程度上影响员工告发行为的了解有限。因此，没有与其组成部分相匹配的道德计划可能无法促进举报人的行为，并被视为减少组织法律责任的仅仅是装点门面的行为。除了关于组织道德计划的少数概念性著作外，目前基于观察性现场数据的实证研究缺乏关于道德计划关于举报人有效性的实证研究，进一步缺乏在相同环境下比较不同制度和政策的举报人有效性的能力。因此，我们建议使用实验经济学作为研究的方法论方法。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。这种控制允许对来自博弈论和(行为)经济学模型的精确预测进行测试。此外，尽管由于最高管理层的战略考虑，现有的道德制度可能会被内生采用，但我们能够在受控的条件下从外部改变和操纵这些制度。因此，我们可以设计反事实的情况，以便对关于告密的具体政策进行因果推断，否则就不可能在实地观察或构建这些政策。该研究项目分为四个子项目。首先，计划建立一个基线设置，在这一设置中，在两个不同的组织环境中调查告发倾向，而不需要任何基于合规和诚信的道德方案的进一步干预。在第二和第三个分项目中，设计了不同的合规和诚信道德干预措施，并将其纳入基线设置，以分别审查它们对举报人行为的有效性。在最后的子项目中，我们使用前面的子项目的见解来结合不同的基于合规和基于诚信的道德干预措施，以研究对举报人的联合影响。

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.