Blowing the Whistle

Blowing the Whistle.

Michele Aab

Lincoln College Online

Blowing the Whistle.

Corporations have a moral responsibility to do no harm, and the managers who control their operations have the same responsibility. An operation manager’s duties are related to the creation of goods and services through the transformation of inputs and outputs (Heizer & Render, 2011). When these processes of creation or the transformations of inputs and outputs might come into question morally, is when whistleblowing takes center stage of an operation manger’s duties. What an operations manager’s responsibilities are when they are approached by whistleblowers, or if feel they need to blow the whistle themselves, have moral and legal ramifications; therefore, it is important that the individuals hold the position of operations managers within corporations understand the ins and outs of whistleblowing from a variety of perspectives.

First and foremost, whistleblowing can be defined as the disclosure by a person, usually an employee in a government agency or private enterprise, to the public or to those in authority, of mismanagement, corruption, illegality, or some other wrongdoing (Farlex, 2012). There are different types of whistleblowing such as; internal, external, governmental, non-governmental, personal and impersonal, that operations managers will have to concern themselves with. Non-governmental, impersonal, and external whistle blowing will be the types they might be faced with the most.

Internal whistleblowing is the disclosure or allegation of inappropriate conduct made to someone within an organization or system (DeGeorge, 2010). A good example of this would be an employee reporting a co-worker for cheating on his or her time sheet. An operations manager would handle such a complaint internally; he or she would probably address this with the employee directly before taking and action with higher ups within the organization. An example of external whistleblowing, following a similar scenario, would occur when a worker reports misconduct to an outside agency, not their immediate supervisor (in this case the operations manager). Internal whistleblowing might appear to be more of a moral issue, opposed to external whistleblowing, which has more legal ramifications against the company, but in both of the scenarios, the operations manger’s responsibility would be to first analysis the impact to the company’s operations and then to address the moral issue.

Governmental whistleblowing, which is rarely addressed by an operations manager, occurs when a government employee leaks wrongdoings occurring inside the governmental agency, to the media (DeGeorge, 2010). Non-governmental whistleblowing