This chapter has confirmed the soundness of the basic objectives of whistleblowing legislation and procedures discussed in Chapter 1. The encouragement of reporting appears to turn directly on employee confidence that the organisation will take effective action to stop or remedy the perceived wrongdoing. In many cases, the decision to report will also hinge on an employee’s natural assessment of the associated risk and especially whether the organisation is capable of protecting them from adverse outcomes if more senior employees or management itself are involved.

The same results show, however, that in a large proportion of instances, current whistleblowing policies are struggling to deliver the levels of employee confidence necessary to satisfy these primary preconditions of reporting. Many of the results suggest that the low reporting rates and high inaction rates in response to perceived wrongdoing described in Chapter 2 stem from the need for organisations to do more to gain the confidence of employees that reports or wrongdoing will be handled seriously and professionally.

Among those who are not currently inclined to report the wrongdoing they observe, the degree of ambivalence towards managerial responses or other strategies such as symbolic legislation (Table 3.15) confirms this is not necessarily an easy task. Many of the solutions lie in the types of procedural and legislative reforms discussed in later chapters. For its part, this chapter has demonstrated the need for managers to abandon some stereotypical views of whistleblowers and focus instead on the encouragement and better management of reporting, on the basis that, depending on the circumstances, almost any employee can be expected to speak up about wrongdoing. Similarly, depending on the circumstances, almost any employee might also remain silent. The focus of management needs to fall on these different circumstances, including whether the organisational environment is conducive to speaking up. In particular, the prospects for encouraging the early and more constructive forms of reporting may well depend on how effectively management responses to whistleblowing reflect a larger commitment to organisational justice.