The determinants of whistleblowing in public administrations: an analysis conducted in Italian health organizations, universities, and municipalities

ABSTRACT

The aim of this paper is to examine which variables are most important in encouraging whistleblowing in Italian public administrations, as a result of the compulsory application of the anti-corruption Law No. 190/2012. Our research is based on an empirical analysis of 365 public administrations: 86 hospitals, 137 health agencies, 39 universities, and 103 major Italian municipalities.

The results show that whistleblowing seems to occur more frequently in large public administrations, to be associated with formal procedures and an organizational proceduralization that encourages individuals to actually blow the whistle, and that it is only partially correlated to training and education.

KEYWORDS:

• Whistleblowing
• corruption
• anti-corruption strategies
• good government
• compliance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pietro Previtali

Pietro Previtali is rector’s delegate for Human Resources management and associate professor of Business Organization at the Department of Economics and Management Sciences, University of Pavia. He teaches and conducts research on public organization and management and on the managerial issues surrounding compliance and the introduction of information technologies in public agencies and private companies.

Paola Cerchiello

Paola Cerchiello is assistant professor of Statistics at the Department of Economics and Management Sciences, University of Pavia, where she teaches Applied Statistics and Big Data Analysis. She is author of several papers, mainly on text data models, ordinal variables, financial risk, and big data analysis.