You’d think they’d be heralded as heroes for pointing out flaws in a system (physical or interpersonal) or corruption within an organization, but no. I’ve read a lot of stories lately where someone will call attention to a critical flaw of this sort, but TPTB will typically fire his ass instead of commending him and fixing the flaw. Sounds like they’re shooting the messenger in a lot of cases. Anyone care to shed more light on this mindset?
If you blow the whistle on something, one of two things are happening.
First, you’re revealing something that embarrasses the organization. You do that anywhere and you’ll be shown the door.
Second, you’re disclosing some secret of the company, thus demonstrating that you cannot be trusted with items of a sensitive nature. You are therefore useless because they’ll never be able to trust you again.
In any event, nobody rats on an organization to laud them for their greatness or benevolence. It’s always something that puts the organization in a negative light. As such, you make yourself unwanted. Before you decide to blow the whistle on something you better be sure you can accept the consequences of your actions.
So you don’t think whistleblowers are sometimes good people who are punished unfairly for following the dictates of their conscience, Airman Doors?
I don’t think he said anything about whether whistleblowers are good or bad people…just that they’ve shown they can’t be trusted.
I say if someone exposes a company doing something illegal it should be a crime for the company to reduce benefits (including upgrading their salary every to match the purchasing power of the their salary when the blew the whistle) to that person or fire them.
What motivation does the person have to do their job, you say? None! That’s part of the punishment. A useless employee they gotta pay till the person dies.
Trusted to keep quite and let unethical things continue? Why is anyone who would keep quite trust-worthy? They’ve shown they’ve got no principles, no spine.
Only because the organisation is doing something that puts themselves is a negative light. Unfortunately many people care more about looking right than being right, so they’d rather everyone ignore the problem instead of being forced by public scrutiny to fix it.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the mob kills informants. If I’m doing something illegal or even something that would be embarrasing to me if it got out, I don’t want people around who are going to tell other people.
Anyone who keeps quiet about something like that is trustworthy, and they’ve shown that they put loyalty to me ahead of their own moral judgements. I can trust they’re going to do what I tell them.
I made no value judgments intentionally. The question as posed was answered. He wanted to know why it happened that way.
Now, if i am to assign a value judgment, most whistleblowers are following their conscience and are doing what you and I think is the right thing. Even so, doing the right thing has its own set of consequences.
Then there are people with other motivations who do things for their own purposes. Not every whistleblower has benevolence in their heart. Some do it to intentionally make their employers look bad, and the way they do it allows them to control the spin, make something relatively innocuous look bad simply by asserting that it is and relying on the general belief that ratting something out implies that it is negative.
Which takes me back to my initial response. Every case must be judged on its own merits.
Well IANACC (I am not a crooked company) but someone who ignores their moral judgments tells me they’ll act amorally, and screw me over if it suits them.
Companies don’t give a shit about your moral compass. They want you to do as you’re told. Let’s assume you’re the type of person who would shoplift; are you going to get angry at your friends for not turning you in?
I don’t understand your confusion at all.
Quoted for emphasis.
A company is a machine that makes money. That is the goal above all else. While many are run with a sense of fairness and ethics, you get ahead by being a better competitor. That doesn’t favor the ethical. Their interest is in your loyalty and performance, nothing more. It only makes sense to get rid of a troublemaker. If you can’t perform as needed, then they will find someone who will. It’s that simple.
Yes, really - to go back to the OP, ***of course ***they’re shooting the messenger: it’s cheaper and easier than fixing the root problem. If the company were ethically and conscientiously seeking to do it right to begin with there probably would not be a whistle to blow. What’s so complicated about that?
The management at DodgyCorp DOES presume that you will screw them over when the relationship stops being beneficial to your interests (of course, they count on that having a steady income and being able to “ever work in this town again” are very, very high on your value scale of what those interests are). Whether blowing the whistle or moving to another company with your best client accounts, to them it’s the same, you made them lose money or lose face or both.
to respond to the actual question, as a corporate person – responding without thinking my personal relative for the moment – the fact that someone is going outside the organization and air whatever dirty laundry is automatically a sign that the person can’t be trusted with sensitive information in the future.
From a moral compass point of view there is an argument, perhaps a strained one but it’s a legitimate argument, that the “good people” in the organization should work through the organization to achieve change.or put another way will frequently unfounded, there is a sensation that “we could’ve worked this out, no need to go on public’” it is certainly difficult call to make once or twice in my career over 20 years I have had a niggling desire to go public for something I felt was wrong, but in the end we worked it out internally, perhaps not total satisfaction but enough to make me feel morally okay. I think that illustrates where the reaction comes from. Or at least part of the reaction, so one need not think that it’s all evil corporate.
And what I’m not getting is this corporate loyalty thing. How does it go beyond money? People don’t work free, and jobs people do to feel good are generally ethical. So it’s money based if they violate their ethics. If it’s based on money why wouldn’t they screw the company over the first chance it becomes profitable?
Now see that actually makes sense. Thanks:)
You get ahead by being more competent than your competitors, and that means fixing problems as they arise, not going into denial mode and shooting (be it figuratively or literally) those who attempt to point out problems and suggest solutions. In a rationally-run organization, those who expose such flaws should be lauded, not denigrated (unless of course the organization’s raison d’etre is PR and little more). Thus the head honcho’s interest would be in your competence and willingness to say what needs to be said, such that the company’s performance improves once they act on fixing said problem(s).
Yeah, I know, I’m so idealistic and naive that it isn’t even funny. Most bosses have egos too big to admit that they could be wrong about something and/or that there are problems that they have ignored-that’s how they got to be bosses in the first place, after all. And a lot depends on whether the whistle was blown internally, or publically; in some cases I get the sense that internal solutions were attempted, but thwarted, and the whistleblower had no other choice than to go public.
It’s a tautology as worded. A “whistleblower”, by definition, is someone who is making trouble for the corporation, whether or not they’ve previously tried to work within the corporate structure.
If they work within the corporate structure and are listened to and *successfully *bring about necessary change, they’re not whistleblowers, they’re team players or innovators or Employee of the Month.
Whistle blowing generally involves someone who wasn’t able to get his corporation to stop doing something that was a violation of the law. While corporate thinking should be that such an employee is saving the company from grave financial risk, that is seldom the case, not because of inherent characteristics of corporation, but the common characteristics of people. You broke the law because it benefited you in some way. You know that being caught and prosecuted will be highly damaging to your corporation, and, much more important to you, the guy who made the decision. So, you try to nail the whistle blower, and the corporation goes along because you are the decision maker, and your problems are the corporation’s problems.
Blather about the value of loyalty to the corporation is just self justification. The corporation which is reported for committing crimes is not making any decisions on the basis of ethics. Profit to the managers themselves is the sole criteria by which those decisions are being made, and ethical stockholders would want thieves thrown out of the company, no matter how profitable their actions were. Unhappily the entire point of the structure of corporations is to limit the ethical consequences of business to the owners of that business.
Tris
It also sends a message to future whistleblowers…“Expose us and we’ll show you what Hell is.”