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Think your company is in trouble because of the high number of internal whistleblowing events it experiences? Well, you're likely in much better shape than you think, according to new research by a pair of business professors.

In a digital article published today by Harvard Business Review, two academics presented some conclusions based on an analysis of more than 1.2 million records of internal reports made by employees of public U.S. companies. The information was obtained from a proprietary database obtained from NAVEX Global, Inc., a provider of whistleblower hotline and incident management systems.

The bottom line?

“Whistleblowers—and large numbers of them—are crucial to keeping firms healthy and that functioning internal hotlines are of paramount importance to business goals including profitability,” wrote Stephen Stubben, an associate professor in the School of Accounting at the University of Utah, and Kyle Welch, assistant professor of accountancy at The George Washington University School of Business.

“The more employees use internal whistleblowing hotlines, the less lawsuits companies face, and the less money firms pay out in settlements.”

The findings, Welch said in an interview Wednesday, were surprising, particularly in light of information gleaned from past research into external whistleblowing, which found linked more external reporting events with increased future lawsuits and negative performance.

“Looking back, it makes sense,” Welch said. “The more reports a firm gets internally [allows] it to get ahead of something before it becomes a problem externally. If you have manager harassing someone in any one of a number of ways, the sooner feedback [into those incidents] can be gained, the sooner things can be corrected or changed.”

While the results themselves ultimately may be intuitive, they are also counterintuitive to how many executives manage complaints, Welch and Stubben said. Such executives continue to ignore or misuse whistleblower hotlines or fail to know what to make of the information that is provided through them.

However, according to these findings, managers would be well-served to encourage robust use among employees of the internal whistleblower hotline, prominently displaying posters advertising its existence in work areas and including information about the tool in companywide communications, Welch said.

Welch also predicts that these research findings will change how managers and board members look at reports of internal whistleblowing incidents, noting that they can provide a benchmark as to where companies stand in terms of industry and number of employees.

“Instead of looking at these reports and saying, 'We're slightly above average, so maybe we have more problems,' it's a signal that we're capturing more, that we're talking about [incidents] and trying to figure them out,” Welch said.