Employee Sensitivity to the Risk of Whistleblowing via Social Media: The Role of Social Media Strategy and Policy

Fangjun Xiao () and Bernard Wong-On-Wing ()
Additional contact information
Fangjun Xiao: San Jose State University
Bernard Wong-On-Wing: Washington State University

Journal of Business Ethics, 2022, vol. 181, issue 2, No 14, 519-542

Abstract: Abstract Employee whistleblowing via social media channels represents a very high risk to corporate reputation and can potentially lead to litigation and financial loss, especially when the message goes viral. This research examines the effect of social media strategy and social media policy on employees’ sensitivity to the high risk of whistleblowing via social media. We study the effect across employee gender and across two social media misconducts (information leaking and online venting). Our results indicate that the impact of social media strategy and social media policy on employees’ sensitivity differs between gender and across the two cases. In the information leaking case, social media strategy, social media policy and gender jointly influence employee sensitivity to the risk of whistleblowing via social media channels. In the online venting case, gender has a main effect on that sensitivity. Our study has implications for the role of social media in management control systems and adds to the literature on whistleblowing. Our findings also have practical implications related to the use of social media strategy and policies.

Keywords: Social media strategy; Social media policy; Whistleblowing; Gender; Organizational identification; Moral judgments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10551-021-04914-0 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:jbuset:v:181:y:2022:i:2:d:10.1007_s10551-021-04914-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10551/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10551-021-04914-0

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Ethics is currently edited by Michelle Greenwood and R. Edward Freeman

More articles in Journal of Business Ethics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().