Ethical Climate and Whistleblowing Intentions: Testing the Mediating Roles of Public Service Motivation and Psychological Safety Among Local Government Employees

Date01 September 2021
DOI10.1177/0091026020944547
Published date01 September 2021
Subject MatterArticles
https://doi.org/10.1177/0091026020944547
Public Personnel Management
2021, Vol. 50(3) 327 –355
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0091026020944547
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Article
Ethical Climate and
Whistleblowing Intentions:
Testing the Mediating Roles
of Public Service Motivation
and Psychological Safety
Among Local Government
Employees
Wisanupong Potipiroon1
and Achakorn Wongpreedee2
Abstract
Local governments in several developing countries are plagued with corruption.
This study draws attention to the role of organizational ethical climate in promoting
whistleblowing intentions among local government employees and asks whether
public service motivation (PSM) and perceptions of psychological safety mediate
this relationship. Based on survey data of 365 employees in 40 local governments
in Thailand, our multilevel analysis confirms that the relationships between
ethical climate and internal and external whistleblowing intentions were indirect.
In particular, psychological safety was found to play a mediating role at both the
individual and organizational levels of analysis, whereas the mediating role of PSM
was observed only at the individual level. The findings also revealed the presence of
“collective PSM” at the organizational level, which in turn helped to facilitate external
whistleblowing intentions. This research unveils the importance of individual- and
organization-level factors in the whistleblowing decision-making process.
Keywords
whistleblowing intentions, ethical climate, psychological safety, public service
motivation, multilevel structural equation modeling, Thailand
1Prince of Songkla University, Hat Yai, Thailand
2National Institute of Development Administration, Bangkok, Thailand
Corresponding Author:
Wisanupong Potipiroon, Assistant Professor, Department of Public Administration, Faculty of
Management Sciences, Prince of Songkla University, Kohong, Hat Yai 90112, Songkla Province, Thailand.
Email: wisanupong.p@psu.ac.th
944547PPMXXX10.1177/0091026020944547Public Personnel ManagementPotipiroon and Wongpreedee
research-article2020
328 Public Personnel Management 50(3)
Introduction
Local governments are the primary point of interaction between the government and
most members of the public, delivering important services to their citizens ranging
from health care to environmental protection, schools, social services, and public
works. Unfortunately, in several developing countries, such as Thailand, there are
widespread reports of local elites and public officials engaging in corrupt practices
including the diversion of public funds for private gains, the initiation of “political
showcase” projects that do not serve public needs, and the participation in unscrupu-
lous bidding processes that undermine the quality of public goods delivered to the
local community (e.g., Ferraz & Finan, 2011; Haque, 2010). The risk of such corrup-
tion schemes is most evident during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has pushed local
governments to expedite their spending to reboot the local economy, while the trans-
parency of procurement and contracting procedures is compromised (Aman & Wurth,
2020; Ekachai, 2020; Gallego et al., 2020).
Because corruption transactions almost always occur behind closed doors, it is criti-
cal for those who are aware of the misconduct to come forward to inform authorities or
the public about it. The present research draws attention to the role of whistleblowing in
fighting public sector corruption. Whistleblowing has been defined as the exposure of
wrongful practices by organizational members in the hope of stopping the wrongdoings
(Dozier & Miceli, 1985; Miceli & Near, 1985). In particular, this present research focuses
on employee intentions to blow the whistle both internally and externally (Miceli et al.,
1988, 2008; Miceli & Near, 1985). Indeed, employees may choose to go up the chain of
command to report the observed misconduct or they may choose to do so via external
parties such as the media, government regulators, or public interest groups (Park &
Blenkinsopp, 2009). Past research indicates that each reporting channel has its own asso-
ciated costs and benefits (Dworkin & Baucus, 1998) and that it is important from both
the theoretical and practical standpoints to understand the factors that may influence
how employees decide to blow the whistle (i.e., through internal vs. external channels;
Dungan et al., 2019; Latan et al., 2018; Park & Blenkinsopp, 2009; Park et al., 2005).
Although employees play a central role in exposing organizational wrongdoing
(Miceli et al., 2008; Miceli & Near, 2005), it is unfortunate that they tend to suffer
from retaliation from their superiors (Rehg et al., 2008; Rothschild & Miethe, 1999).
For example, employees in a Norwegian municipality who sought to report the abnor-
malities in the local procurement projects had faced a series of retaliation (e.g., isola-
tion, verbal attacks, and career derailment) from the city council and mayor (Gottschalk,
2017). In Thailand, although public sector whistleblowers are technically protected
against such unfair work practices, they also face similar consequences in their jobs as
agency administrators are immune from penalization for engaging in such practices
(Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD], 2018). It is thus
not a surprise that organizational insiders who are aware of wrongdoing often refrain
from reporting it (Miceli et al., 2009).
In this article, we argue that the ethical climates of local governments may compen-
sate for these institutional and legal shortcomings. Ethical climate has been defined as

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