Whistle-blowing in organizations: an examination of the link between paternalistic leadership and employees' whistle-blowing behaviors.

High-profile corporate scandals have shown that organizations rely on employees to report wrongdoing internally before misconduct escalates, yet employees may hesitate to do so when reporting threatens relationships or challenges authority. Although prior research has examined several leadership antecedents of whistle-blowing, less is known about how employees respond to leadership styles that convey multiple and potentially competing signals. This study examines how leader benevolence, morality, and authoritarianism, the three components of paternalistic leadership, independently and jointly affect employees' whistle-blowing behaviors. Specifically, we employed a two-wave time-lagged design and collected survey data from 313 full-time employees working in various industries in China. The findings revealed that benevolent leadership and moral leadership were positively related to employee whistle-blowing behavior, whereas authoritarian leadership was negatively related to it. Moreover, benevolent and moral leadership have a positive interaction effect, whereas authoritarian leadership weakens the positive effects of both benevolent and moral leadership. The three-way interaction further indicates that internal whistle-blowing is most likely when benevolent and moral leadership are both high and authoritarian leadership is low. These findings extend whistle-blowing and paternalistic leadership research by showing how the three dimensions of paternalistic leadership jointly shape internal whistle-blowing.