Predicting whistleblowing intention among private sector employees - evidence from Malaysian hotels industry / Shamifaten Suhaimi

Whistleblowing is one of the internal control mechanisms to protect an organization from any wrongdoings. It refers to the employee’s decision to report wrongdoing discovered in the course of performing his or her duties. The phenomenon become one of the most popular areas in research both in public or private sectors. Indeed, recent evidence has shown the increasing issues of integrity, bribery, fraud, and theft in later sector as opposed to the former. These wrongdoings can be prevented if they were highlighted by the internal members to those who are in higher position that can take action. To date, the whistleblowing has been the interest of many research and the focus was on many industries such as tourism, hospital, food and construction. However, less emphasized on hotel, although it encounters similar issues. This phenomenon has instigated the researcher to look for factors that lead to whistle-blow specifically in hotel industry. Indeed, many factors have been predicted to influence the intention to whistleblow. Employing Theory of Planned Behaviour, and following prior research, the objective of this research is to examine the influence of attitude, subjective norms and perceived behavioural control on the intention to whistleblow. The researcher distributed a total of 264 questionnaires to Malaysian hoteliers and analyzed the data using SPSS version 27. The results indicated that all the predicted variables namely attitude, subjective norms and perceived behavioural controls were related to intention to whistle-blow and thus supports the Theory of Planned Behaviour. Hence, the discoveries provide beneficial insights to the policymaker, authorities, academicians, hotel industry, employees and the likes of the importance of having positive attitude, supports from families and friends together with conducive system in promoting whistleblowing in work places. Eventually, nurturing whistleblowing in workplace will mitigate wrongdoing and thus lead to a corrupt free society.