Luppo Kuillman

Facilitating and motivating factors for reporting reprehensible conduct 87 4 Factors enhancing the likelihood of reporting reprehensible conduct Our primary hypothesis is that two antecedent factors are particularly likely to enhance the propensity to report reprehensible conduct of colleagues. The first factor is largely motivational: the importance that healthcare professionals attach to ethicality. We refer to it as “ethics advocacy (EA).” The second factor is largely related to ability: “behavioral control targeted at preventing harm (BCPH).” We predict that BCPH functions as a condition that must be fulfilled in order for the EA to have any effect. The two factors are clarified below. Ethics advocacy (EA) Ethics advocacy (EA) refers to the importance that individuals attach to ethicality within the specific context of healthcare delivery. More specifically, EA entails the extent to which healthcare professionals consider it important for attention to be paid to the ethical aspects of care within their organization and during patient contact. In our operationalization, EA appears to be closely congruent to the concept of “moral identity,” which has been defined as the degree to which being a moral individual is central to one’s own self-concept. This can vary from person to person (Aquino & Reed II, 2002). Moral identity has been shown to predict moral cognitions, and moral action has been shown to be negatively related to the intention to engage in ethical wrongdoing (Shao, Aquino, & Freeman, 2008) and positively related to the intention to engage in whistleblowing (Proost, Pavlinská, Baillien, Brebels, & Van den Broeck, 2013; Watts & Buckley, 2017). Like moral identity, EA might have a positive influence on moral behavior. More specifically, individuals with a high level of EA attach importance to the ethical aspects of care and are likely to be more motivated to devote attention to ethical aspects themselves. They are more likely to recognize situations as moral dilemmas, and they are more inclined to make morally appropriate choices. We therefore expect individuals with a strong orientation to ethics advocacy to be more targeted at preventing harm and to be more driven by the intrinsic motivation of their own moral standard of applying ethics, thus making them more likely to report reprehensible conduct. In other words, people with high EA will be more bothered by observing immoral practices and more likely to feel an urge to denounce reprehensible conduct.