In a working environment, planned behaviour theory is usedas a theoretical groundwork to explain whistleblowing intention.
Attitude,normative beliefs and self-efficacy are the elements that will affect anemployee’s intention to whistle blow a perceived information security policyviolation internally (Wei & Hsu, 2014). As it is impracticable to measure variousbehaviour in organizational environment, so behavioural intention is being consideredas a proxy variable for real whistleblowing action. According to planned behaviour theory whichoriginate by Ajzen (1991), the behavioural intention of an individual is held tobe influenced by three key factors.
First, attitude refers to the opinion of aperson towards another person behaviour. Secondly, subjective norm equivalent tonormative beliefs which represents the extent to which such planned behaviouris being agreed by others. Third, perceived behavioural control refers to the perceptionof how difficult or easy for a specific behaviour to be achieved. Attitude is prettymuch crucial due to reason that one’s attitude is the only variable which the objectiveinformation can manipulate it (Bulgurcu, Cavusoglu & Benbasat, 2010). The third element of Ajzen’s theory of planned behaviour,perceived behavioural control is closely related to the Bandura’s (1977) conceptof self-efficacy. Ajzen (1991) found that the intention of an individual toperform a behaviour increases when his or her perceived behavioural control isgreater. Furthermore, the self-efficacy represents an individual ‘s beliefabout whether the behaviour in question can be well performed by thatparticular individual (Bandura, 1997).
The individuals who able to make a soundjudgment and behave ethically are those with high self-efficacy, they always showcompetence and high self-esteem when encountered with challenging circumstances(Beu, Buckley & Harvey, 2003). Besides, theory of cognitive consistency proposesthat a high worth self-perception is align with the ethical behaviour and highself-efficacy individuals in confident with their competence believe they can performethically and succeed without unethical behaviour (Beu et al., 2003). There aremany previous studies revealed that self-efficacy was the best indicator topredict one’s intention to obey rules (e.g.
Broadhead-Fearn & White, 2006). Moreover, self-efficacy is critical due tohigh self-efficacy individuals tend to put more efforts on the task given and experiencepositive emotions toward the task (Bandura, 1997). According to Park andBlenkinsopp (2009) study, the perceived behavioural control is found to had positiveand direct effects on internal whistle-blowing intentions. Therefore, we canhold that self-efficacy has positive relationship with the intention towhistle-blow. Employeewhistleblowing is a pro-social action, whereas student whistleblowing is toreport misconduct in a university (Burton & Near, 1995; Trevin˜o & Weaver, 2003).
From the perspective of students, the factorsthat will influence their intention to be a whistleblower are different as comparedto the willingness of whistleblower to report unethical behaviour in the organization.Individual differences have a great impact on the willingness of students towhistle blow and the control variables consist of general self-efficacy,whistleblowing efficacy, ethical orientation, ethicstraining, Grade Point Average (GPA), nationality, and gender (Stone, Kisamore, Kluemper & Jawahar, 2012). Asself-efficacy may affect an individual’s judgements to involve or refrain in particularactivities, thus students who possess high self-efficacy and with confidentthey can report successfully will have higher possibility to whistle blow the misconductthan the low self-efficacy students (Miceli, Van Scotter, Near & Rehg , 2001).
