Samenvatting

Whistleblowing research should more explicitly focus on underlying motives for the decision to report on organizational misbehavior. Arguably, these motives are connected to the factors that can explain the decision whether or not to blow the whistle. Reporting for egoistic reasons can probably be explained by other factors than reporting for altruistic reasons. This article aims to enrich the whistleblowing literature by proposing grid-group cultural theory as an alternative approach. This theoretical framework could provide more insight into reporting decisions by identifying various motives for such decisions and linking them with elements in the organizational culture that could explain them. As an illustration, the theory is applied in an ethnographic study in two investigative teams of the Belgian federal police. More research is, however, needed to fine-tune the conceptual framework and to test the preliminary findings of this empirical study.