A Contrastive Cross-cultural Research On Whistle-blowing Tendency Between Chinese And American Managers

This study is conducted to explore American and Chinese managers' tendency to blow the whistle in terms of cultural differences.Trompenaars' theory on cultural dimensions (universalism vs particularism, collectivism vs individualism, neutral vs emotional culture, specific vs diffuse culture, achievement vs ascription) and Dr.Keenan's conceptual foundation on whistle-blowing tendency form the theoretical foundation for the thesis. Previous study on cross-cultural whistle-blowing tendency is in an exploratory phase. Dr.Keenan contributes to this field more than others. The author chooses to follow his conceptual foundation on whistle-blowing tendency and combines his conceptual foundation with Trompenaars' cultural dimensions. Dr.Keenan's research questions, conceptual foundation and questionnaire form a systematic structure. The author tries to put forward the research questions following the standard conceptual foundation put forward by Dr.Keenan in order to find out the differences between American managers and Chinese managers on whistle-blowing tendency in terms of fear of retaliation, individual propensity, organizational propensity, expressed moral conception and expressed possibility to blow the whistle.The study is carried out through the analysis of data collected with Dr.Keenan's tested questionnaires (All rights of the questionnaire are reserved by Dr.Keenan). Altogether, 60 effective questionnaires from China are got and 60 questionnaires from America are selected. Mann-Whitney U-test is applied to measure whether Chinese and American managers are significantly different in whistle-blowing tendency. Meanwhile, means of each variable (individual propensity, organizational propensity, fear of retaliation, expressed moral perception and expressed likelihood) are studied for comparison of Chinese and American managers' whistle-blowing tendency.The result of the study indicates that American managers will be less fear of retaliation from whistle-blowing while Chinese managers will be more intended to consider the possible revenge from others. Individually and organizationally, American managers will be more intended to blow the whistle. They express more moral conception on serious mistakes and mistakes which will do harm to others. But they express less moral perception on whistle-blowing minor fraud. In terms of expressed likelihood, American managers express more intention to blow the whistle on fraud which is serious, less serious and will do harm to others. Generally speaking, Chinese and American managers both have intention to whistleblow, but American managers have stronger intention than Chinese managers.The findings are encouraging and give guidance on incorparation of different theories of culture in the study of whistle-blowing. The current study will also provide guidance to those who explore cross-cultural communication as well as to those who are interested in ethical decision-making studies.