By definition, whistleblowing represents “the disclosure by organization members (former or current) of illegal, immoral, or illegitimate practices under the control of their employers, to persons or organizations that may be able to effect action” (Near & Miceli, 1985, p. 4). Applying this definition to the real-life example at the beginning of our manuscript suggests that Claire’s behavior can indeed be viewed as whistleblowing because (1) she discloses information to an organization that may be able to effect action (i.e., to a newspaper) and (2) because she is an employee of the organization in which the immoral practice occurred (i.e., the hospital).

It is interesting to note that, according to this definition, a prosocial motive pursued by the whistleblower is not a defining feature of whistleblowing. As such, most researchers would also consider it whistleblowing if a disclosure about organizational misconduct was pursued with selfish motives or even with the intention to harm other people. Empirical evidence from real-life whistleblowing cases, however, show that whistleblowing usually aims at stopping organizational wrongdoing that harms people, groups, or organizations other than the whistleblower: A survey among 1,000 whistleblowers, for example, found that the organizational wrongdoing that the whistleblower intended to rectify harmed other people in 81% of the reported cases (Vandekerckhove et al., 2013). The assumption that whistleblowing represents a form of prosocial behavior is also reflected in various theoretical accounts (e.g., Dozier & Miceli, 1985). In the following, we will refer to the decision to blow the whistle or remain silent as whistleblowing (vs. inaction) decision.

In a recently published theoretical framework on personality effects in whistleblowing decisions, it was hypothesized that whistleblowing situations typically entail a morally ambiguous organizational activity and that individuals need to evaluate how morally wrong an organizational activity is (Fischer et al., 2024). In the scenario we used at the beginning of this manuscript, Claire thus needs to evaluate how morally (or legally) wrong she perceives the cost-saving measures at the hospital to be. In the theoretical framework, it was further hypothesized that moral wrongfulness judgments hinge on the observer’s personality in the sense that prosocial personality dimensions (e.g., HEXACO Honesty-Humility) should be positively associated with judgements about how morally wrong an ambiguous organizational activity is. HEXACO Honesty-Humility has been defined as the “tendency to be fair and genuine in dealing with others, in the sense of cooperating with others even when one might exploit them without suffering retaliation” (Ashton & Lee, 2007, p. 156). As high values on this dimension reflect traits such as being fair and genuine, we assume that HEXACO Honesty-Humility should relate to harsher judgements of morally wrong or morally dubious activities. Higher moral wrongfulness judgments should, in turn, make a whistleblowing (vs. inaction) decision more likely. Therefore, we predicted that HEXACO Honesty-Humility is positively associated with a decision for whistleblowing (versus inaction; Hypothesis 1).¹1

We did not pre-register the mediation hypothesis for this main effect via moral wrongfulness judgements, but our data allows this idea to be tested as well.

Reporting concerns about misconduct within one’s own organization to internal (e.g., to the company’s management) or external (e.g., the media, authorities) recipients are known as internal and external whistleblowing, respectively (e.g., Dworkin & Baucus, 1998; Miceli et al., 2008). A robust finding in whistleblowing research is that the vast majority of whistleblowers first voice their concerns internally before they choose to make the issue public (Bjørkelo et al., 2011; Vandekerckhove et al., 2013). Correspondingly, researchers have argued that external whistleblowing is often seen as a breach of loyalty with one’s organization. External whistleblowing entails a moral dilemma of being loyal to one’s organization versus being fair to people outside of that organization who might suffer from the organizational wrongdoing (e.g., Waytz et al., 2013). This so-called “whistleblower’s dilemma” is not equally present in internal whistleblowing because addressing one’s concerns internally does not necessarily communicate a lack of loyalty or disengagement from the organization, but rather that one highly identifies with the organization and therefore wants to change its norms and practices (see Anvari et al., 2019).

Referring back to Claire’s case from the beginning of our article, one could argue that Claire would have avoided negative consequences and a breach of loyalty with her company if she had raised her concerns internally (e.g., to the company’s management) before disclosing it through external reporting channels (e.g., to the media). In the following, we will refer to the decision to engage in external or internal whistleblowing as the internal (vs. external) whistleblowing decision.

In the recent theoretical framework on personality effects in whistleblowing decisions (Fischer et al., 2024), it was proposed that prosocial tendencies shape this decision as well, in the sense that prosocial personality dimensions should increase the likelihood of internal (vs. external) reporting because they are typically not seen as a breach of loyalty towards one’s organization. More specifically, in an earlier, unpublished version of the framework (Fischer, 2022), it was hypothesized that HEXACO Agreeableness should be positively associated with the internal (vs. external) whistleblowing decision. HEXACO Agreeableness has been defined as “the tendency to be forgiving and tolerant of others, in the sense of cooperating with others even when one might be suffering exploitation by them” (Ashton & Lee, 2007, p. 156). Building on the idea that internal (vs. external) whistleblowing can be seen as continued cooperation with others who acted unfairly, we predicted that HEXACO Agreeableness is positively associated with a decision for internal (versus external) whistleblowing (Hypothesis 2).²2

For full disclosure, we should add that only the unpublished version (Fischer, 2022) but not the published version of the paper (Fischer et al., 2024) includes the hypothesis that HEXACO Agreeableness predicts the decision for internal (vs. external) whistleblowing. Instead, the published version of the manuscript argues that HEXACO Honesty-Humility is most relevant for this decision. This hypothesis was included into the paper after revising the paper in accordance with reviewer feedback. At that point, the pre-registration for the present study had already been published. For that reason, we did not include any hypothesis regarding HEXACO Honesty-Humility here. We will test whether Honesty-Humility predicts the internal vs. external whistleblowing decision nonetheless, as an exploratory analysis in the Results section.

To test our hypotheses, we conducted an online study in which we measured HEXACO Honesty-Humility and Agreeableness and subsequently confronted participants with a whistleblowing scenario. We assessed (1) whether they would decide to blow the whistle, and (2)—if so—whether they would use internal (vs. external) reporting channels. In order to reduce demand characteristics of our materials and instructions, we implemented a two-wave design by measuring the personality dimensions one week before assessing the whistleblowing decisions.

Our study was pre-registered (see Fischer, 2022a). Study materials, dataset, and analysis script can be found on the Open Science Framework (OSF; see Fischer, 2022b). We report how we determined our sample size, all data exclusions, and all measures (Simmons et al., 2012). To reduce the risk of false-positive discoveries, we followed the recommendation by Benjamin et al. (2018) and interpret effects as “significant” if the p-value is < .005. We describe effects with p-values .05 ≤ p ≤ .005 as “suggestive evidence.”

Our study was conducted in accordance with the Ethical Guidelines of the German Psychological Society. We obtained ethics approval from our local ethics committee.

Means, standard deviations, and correlations among all HEXACO dimensions can be found in Table S1 in the Supplementary Materials. Participants judged the organizational practice as rather immoral, M = 4.98; SD = 0.85, on a rating scale ranging from 1 to 6. Absolute and relative frequencies of both whistleblowing decisions are shown in Figure 1.

The present research looked at personality traits underlying the decisions for whistleblowing (vs. inaction) and for internal (vs. external) whistleblowing. Our predictions were that HEXACO Honesty-Humility would predict the whistleblowing (vs. inaction) decision and that HEXACO Agreeableness would predict the internal (vs. external) whistleblowing decision.

We found no evidence for the notion that HEXACO Agreeableness is relevant for either of the two whistleblowing decisions. HEXACO Honesty-Humility, however, was relevant for whistleblowing decisions in two different ways: First, although we did not find a main effect of HEXACO Honesty-Humility on whistleblowing (vs. inaction), we found suggestive evidence for an indirect effect via moral wrongfulness judgements. Second, we found a main effect of HEXACO Honesty-Humility on the internal (vs. external) whistleblowing decision: Higher levels of HEXACO Honesty-Humility were associated with an increased likelihood of internal (vs. external) whistleblowing. Both of these findings are in line with theoretical arguments that Fischer et al. (2024) made. Our results thereby also speak to the proposition that HEXACO Honesty-Humility is a particularly relevant personality dimensions that motivates moral courage (Baumert et al., 2013), because whistleblowing can be seen as a form of moral courage (Fischer et al., 2024).

Another interesting, yet unexpected finding was that HEXACO Emotionality played a role for both types of whistleblowing decisions: Emotionality was positively related to the decision to blow the whistle (vs. inaction) and to the decision for internal (vs. external) whistleblowing. We do not want to overemphasize these effects because they were not hypothesized and they reflect “suggestive evidence” only. However, one explanation is that the scenario in our study described an organizational wrongdoing in the health sector and Emotionality as conceptualized in the HEXACO model also encompasses fearfulness concerning physical danger (Ashton et al., 2014). Thus, the specific context of our scenario may have afforded Emotionality. It is plausible that Emotionality is only relevant for health-related wrongdoings but not, for instance, for financial malpractices. Future research should use different scenarios within the same study to scrutinize which personality effects generalize across different cases of wrongdoing and different whistleblowing situations (see Judd et al., 2012). Another line of future research could identify theoretically-relevant context characteristics (such as the specific type of wrongdoing) and test whether and how they interact with personality in the prediction of whistleblowing.