The Moderating Role of Perceived Organisational Support in Breaking the Silence of Public Accountants

Abstract

This paper reports the results of a survey with public accountants in Barbados on their intention to report a superior's unethical behaviour. Specifically, it investigates to what extent perceived organisational support (POS) in audit organisations would moderate Barbadian public accountants' intentions to blow the whistle internally and externally. Results indicate that internal whistle-blowing intentions are significantly influenced by all five individual antecedents (attitudes, perceived behavioural control, independence commitment, personal responsibility for reporting and personal cost of reporting), and the influence of the antecedents is intensified when the level of POS is high. However, further results indicate that external whistle-blowing intentions are significantly influenced by only three individual-level antecedents viz. attitudes, perceived behavioural control and personal cost of reporting, and their influence is intensified when the level of POS is low. The results suggest that POS is an important mechanism for controlling behaviour.

Whistleblowing Intentions Among Public Accountants in Indonesia: Testing for the Moderation Effects

“…Park and Blenkinsopp (2009) The values obtained validity and reliability of the analytical results measurement model for both the loading factors so that rho_A is > 0.70 and the value is AVE > 0.50 (Hair et al 2017;Latan and Ghozali 2015). Park and Blenkinsopp (2009) and Alleyne et al (2016) also obtained similar results when using this instrument. Table 2B above shows the indicators and outcome measurement model for this variable.…”

“…Besides, according to data from the Association of Certified Fraud Examiner (ACFE), in 2015, Indonesia was one of five countries in the world experiencing the largest fraud cases after South Africa, India, Nigeria and China. This indicates that Indonesia provides the right setting for testing models of whistleblowing, while previous studies have also been conducted in Barbados (Alleyne 2016;Alleyne et al 2016), China (Liu et al 2015;Zhang et al 2009), South Africa (Maroun and Gowar 2013;Maroun and Solomon 2014), Turkey (Erkmen et al 2014;Nayir and Herzig 2012), New Zealand (Liyanarachchi and Newdick 2009), Taiwan (Hwang et al 2008), South Korea (Park and Blenkinsopp 2009), Ireland (Brennan and Kelly 2007), Australia (Cassematis and Wortley 2013; Liyanarachchi and Adler 2011), Germany (Pittroff 2014) and U.S (MacGregor and Stuebs 2014; Robinson et al 2012). However, research in Indonesia still leaves an empirical gap.…”

“…Thus, this study answers the call from Alleyne et al (2013) to test their model in external audit functions. Although Alleyne et al (2016) tested this model on a public accountant in Barbados, the models they tested incomplete. 2 Second, this study reconciles evidence mixture of whistleblowing intentions for the Indonesian context, whereas previous studies provide inconsistent evidence for the relationship between variables.…”

“…2 Second, this study reconciles evidence mixture of whistleblowing intentions for the Indonesian context, whereas previous studies provide inconsistent evidence for the relationship between variables. For example, Alleyne et al (2016) found that intentions for whistleblowing were internally affected by attitudes and externally influenced by perceived behavioral control (PBC), while Izraeli and Jaffe (1998), Park andBlenkinsopp (2009), Buchan (2005), Carpenter and Reimers (2005) found no association. Instead, Dalton and Radtke (2013) found no association between the personal cost of reporting (PCR) with the intention of whistleblowing, while Alleyne et al (2016) found that relationship.…”

“…Previous studies have used students (Gao et al 2015), internal auditors (Alleyne 2016;Robinson et al 2012;Seifert et al 2014), managers (Nayir and Herzig 2012) 2 Alleyne et al (2016) examined the influence of individual-level antecedents to the intention of whistleblowing by using only POS as a moderating variable. But they ignore the other moderating variables such as TNs and PMI.…”