This chapter has shown that the majority of whistleblowing in the Australian public sector is internal to agencies, with public employees on the whole showing a tendency to report wrongdoing internally, predominantly to their supervisor or up the chain of management, at least before they make any further reports elsewhere, including outside the organisation. This contrasts sharply with stereotypes of whistleblowing based on cases that become prominent in the media, which are unlikely to be typical and instead to be cases that have involved many stages, many parties and many more complexities and conflicts than the bulk of whistleblowing matters. Chapters 5 and 6 will go on to analyse some of the differences in outcomes.

Nevertheless, this chapter has also shown that employees who blow the whistle externally—while statistically less frequent—no better fit the stereotype of the misfit, disgruntled or organisationally unhappy employee than the bulk of employees who report internally. Employees who expressed a hypothetical view that it was better to report wrongdoing internally than externally also indicated higher levels of OCB. In practice, however, there was little overall difference between those who only ever reported internally and those who reported externally at some stage. On some OCB sub-scales, there were understandable differences; overall, however, the OCB rating remained high even for external reporters, and particularly on those sub-scales that demonstrated the pro-social nature of reporting at the organisational level. OCB is positively related to whistleblowing propensity and real reporting behaviour, in some cases in different ways, but generally irrespective of whether an internal or external reporting path is taken.

All these analyses provide concrete evidence that it is accurate to conceive of whistleblowing as being generally pro-social in its nature. As a result, it becomes even clearer that agencies can ill afford procedures or a management culture in which employees who report wrongdoing are seen as destabilising or troublemakers. Instead, it is clear that whistleblowers, or those with a whistleblowing propensity, are predominantly conventional organisational citizens and ‘not the disloyal, marginally socialized [people] they are frequently perceived to be’ (Somers and Casal 1994:282). Even when public interest whistleblowing is triggered or accompanied by issues in which employees have strong personal interests, therefore, its character as pro-social behaviour should not be forgotten.

The final analyses have also confirmed the importance of public employees’ level of trust in management—generally and in terms of anticipated response to wrongdoing if reported. Employees who report internally are likely to have high trust in management. Whether these trusting expectations are always met is less certain: the most logical explanation for the reporters’ average slightly lower level of trust is that this flows from the way the cases are then handled. These results tend to confirm that were it not for substantial levels of trust in the organisational response, at least in terms of the wrongdoing being stopped or remedied, it is unlikely that current levels of internal reporting would occur.

Through measures that build employee trust, organisations can expect to maximise the amount of wrongdoing that is reported—internally—in a timely fashion, rather than being left to fester or eventually be reported only externally. The crucial importance of trust, in conjunction with the great likelihood that any reporting will occur internally, emphasises the importance of organisations’ efforts to devise and implement quality internal disclosure procedures and increases their responsibility to manage reported wrongdoing effectively. The heavy current reliance on internal reporting therefore places considerable responsibility on agencies to respond well in their investigation and remediation of alleged wrongdoing and to ensure unnecessary adverse consequences do not befall those who report. Management is judged by its actions and by the outcomes of those actions. Accordingly, the trust on which effective internal reporting at least partly depends is itself dependent on whether management has a proven capacity to properly manage those involved.

While the pattern of internal reporting has many positive implications, these implications also have limits. This includes significant questions for current legislative and procedural arrangements.

As will be seen in Chapters 7 and 10, employees frequently have a low awareness of the statutory provisions intended to encourage internal and regulatory disclosures. While it is encouraging that many officials have sufficient trust in their direct management chain to report wrongdoing, the fact that so few officials (less than 10 per cent of public interest whistleblowers) go outside the management chain to use specialist internal whistleblowing procedures suggests the absence of, a low awareness of or low confidence in those alternative internal avenues. If this is the case, the same is likely to be true of staff awareness and/or confidence in the availability of external regulatory avenues.

Consequently, even if it is natural for public employees to have a preference to report wrongdoing internally and ‘up the line’ in the first instance, the fact that this is currently the overwhelming pattern poses two major challenges. First, it could help explain the significant amount of serious wrongdoing observed by employees about which no action is taken. Chapter 2 showed that 29 per cent of all employee survey respondents who observed very or extremely serious wrongdoing neither reported it nor indicated that anyone else had reported it, nor dealt with it in any other way. For almost one-fifth of the agencies for which that analysis could be performed, this inaction rate exceeded 40 per cent. The evidence in Chapter 3 and this chapter combines to suggest that if public officials are not prepared to report wrongdoing internally, the bulk will simply stay silent.

The overall picture is that despite recent legislative reforms, current whistleblowing systems rely very heavily indeed on the ability of ordinary managers to recognise and take appropriate action in response to public interest disclosures. Public sector employees who do not see this as viable are currently more likely to remain silent than they are to find an alternative whistleblowing avenue—even an authorised internal one. Moreover, when employees do report externally, this is usually after they have already reported internally. Given the lower organisational loyalty and trust recorded by external whistleblowers and further results on outcomes set out in Chapter 5, it is likely that the decision to use an external, authorised reporting path is often made after problems arise with the organisation’s handling of the matter, rather than being identified as an option to start with.

These results increase the need for organisations to place greater effort on training and equipping their managers to handle disclosures appropriately, but also on educating employees about the availability of different reporting avenues. They also increase the need for closer coordination between line and integrity agencies to ensure disclosures are managed in the most appropriate way as early as possible, including by direct reference to external agencies. The alternative is to continue to assume that whistleblowers themselves will know how to make their disclosures to the most appropriate place and to wait for whistleblower dissatisfaction to become the trigger for further external scrutiny, potentially after it is already too late.