When Does a Proactive Personality Enhance an Employee’s Whistle-Blowing Intention?: A Cross-Level Investigation of the Employees in Chinese Companies

Abstract

To identify the boundary conditions for proactive employees making whistle-blowing decisions, we developed a cross-level model comprising employee proactive personality and two types of whistle-blowing intentions that incorporates the influences of organizational- and individual-level attributes. Analyses of data collected from 432 Chinese employees in 32 companies indicated that proactive personality was positively related to internal whistle-blowing intention and even more positively related to external whistle-blowing intention when individuals were working in organizations characterized by an instrumental ethical climate and employees with a high level of moral identity.

Keywords:

• instrumental ethical climate
• moral identity
• proactive personality
• whistle-blowing intention

Notes

¹ Power distance refers to the extent to which a society accepts the fact that the power in institutions and organizations is distributed unequally (Hofstede, 1980).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [71272065, 71332002, 71101101, 71302120].