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Financial incentives for whistleblowers are sometimes used to motivate reporting of organizational misconduct even though some prior research suggests that cash rewards may crowd out intrinsic motivation to blow the whistle. We use an experiment to examine two underexplored areas in the current research on whistleblower incentives. First, we examine the effect of an alternate whistleblower incentive, prosocial rewards, other than traditional cash rewards, on increasing whistleblowing likelihood. Second, we examine whether whistleblower incentives function as a deterrent control by reducing misconduct likelihood. We find that when people are assessing one’s whistleblowing likelihood, both cash and prosocial rewards (versus no rewards) increase the perceived likelihood of one reporting the misconduct. However, when people are assessing one’s misconduct likelihood, only cash but not prosocial rewards (versus no rewards) increases the perceived likelihood of others reporting one’s misconduct, although neither reward influences the perceived likelihood of one engaging in misconduct.
Jacob Lennard, University of Central Florida
Khim Kelly, University of Central Florida
Yu Tian, University of Central Florida