Whistleblowing is the most effective way to unveil wrongdoings. Indeed, whistleblowers often protect their organizations by providing crucial information. While existing research about whistleblowing focuses on the intentions of whistleblowers to report a wrongdoing _after_ a wrongdoing is observed, we seek to understand how individuals view whistleblowing _before_ a wrongdoing is observed. Drawing on self-determination theory our findings of 34 interviews at diverse Canadian nonprofit organizations support our framework and highlight that when a congruence of shared values exists, trust functions (...) as a core belief of the organization, which positively influences an autonomous view of whistleblowing. Based on our findings, we propose a conceptualization of whistleblowing mindset as the root of whistleblowing behaviours that can be influenced by shared or divergent values. We define a whistleblowing mindset as a mental disposition that predetermines individual interpretations and reactions to the witness of a wrongdoing. Our research contributes to the literature by establishing the importance of the whistleblowing mindset in the implementation of whistleblowing programs and providing insights into how shared values can influence the autonomous view in individuals’ whistleblowing mindsets. (shrink)

We examine the impact of corporate culture on environmental performance using a sample of 7199 firm-year observations over the period of 2002–2018. We find that stronger corporate culture improves environmental performance, measured by the amount of toxic chemical release (TCR). Our result is both statistically and economically significant. We also show that cultural norms of innovation, quality and teamwork as well as a technology-oriented corporate culture have a greater impact on enhancing environmental performance. Further analyses show that managerial competence and (...) strong institutional ownership moderate the relationship between corporate culture and environmental performance. We introduce the decomposition of expected and unexpected components of TCR and document that firms with a strong corporate culture implement strategies to reduce the unexpected component of TCR in addition to the expected component of TCR. Finally, we document that strong corporate culture and environmental performance improve firms’ financial performance. Our results are robust to several sensitivity tests and procedures to mitigate endogeneity and self-selection problems. From a practical point of view, our findings suggest that a firm’s culture can determine its environmental sustainability and ethical practices. (shrink)