The relationship of whistleblowing, personal ethical values and organizational commitment: A study in the sample of travel agency employees

Whistleblowing is the disclosure of faulty practices in organizations to internal or external parties capable of solving the problem, on a voluntary basis, in order to terminate the activity. Having a complicated structure, it is affected by individual (age, gender, educational status) situational (legal regulations, retaliation), and organizational factors (organizational climate and size of the organization). It is aimed to annihilate a wrongdoing that abuses the organization, the members of the organization and the society in the main via whistleblowing. From this point, it can be asserted that the whistleblowing has a moral ground, and the ethical values that form the moral ideology of the individual influence positively the attitude towards it. Forwhy individuals associated with ethical values do not remain silent to organizational mistakes, they react, on the contrary. Organizational commitment, on the other hand, is a conduct that embodies the identification of the employees, loyalty, and making efforts for the interests of the organization. In the context of whistleblowing, committed employees respond to improper practices such as waste, mismanagement practices, harassment, mobbing, which can be considered as unethical in order to defend the interests of the organization and restrain it from being harmed. This study consists of five sections. In the first part, the research problem, the purpose of the research, its significance, assumptions, limitations and definitions are indicated. The second part covers the theoretical framework and comprise of three sub-titles. These sub-headings are whistleblowing, ethics and organizational commitment, respectively. The third part consists of the method. The fourth section is constituted of findings and comments, and the last section composes of conclusions and recommendations. The purpose of this study is to investigate the travel agency employees' whistleblowing attitudes, personal ethical values and organizational commitment. In this context, the relationships and effects between whistleblowing, organizational commitment and personal ethical values were tested, and whether it made a difference in terms of demographic factors was examined through statistical analysis. As a result of the analysis, it was found that affective commitment and idealism affect the attitude towards internal and external whistleblowing. Besides, veracity dimension of the ethical position scale impacts the relationship between continuance commitment and informal whistleblowing attitude. Other substantial finding of the study is that the attitude towards external whistleblowing demonstrates significant differences in terms of socio-demographic variables. All in all, it was seen that the travel agency employees participating in the research had a more positive attitude towards the internal whistleblowing, and they had a situationalist constitution in terms of idealism and relativism scores. These conclusions overlaps Turkish society structure. The results related to commitment are thought to be related to the recently experienced pandemic.