Impacts of organizational commitment, interpersonal closeness, and Confucian ethics on willingness to report bad news in software projects

摘要

Individuals working on troubled software projects are often reluctant to report bad news concerning the project to senior management. This problem may be particularly acute when a subordinate must bypass their direct manager because the manager engages in a wrongful effort to suppress the bad news, which is the context for our study. In this research, we examine the impacts of organizational commitment, interpersonal closeness, and Confucian ethics on individuals' willingness to report bad news that is deliberately hidden from upper management and we do this in the Chinese culture context Based on data collected from 158 Chinese software engineers, we found that organizational commitment positively affects individuals' willingness to report, while interpersonal closeness with the wrongdoer negatively affects willingness to report. With respect to the influence of Confucian ethics, our findings suggest that: (1) individuals' ethical disposition toward loyalty between sovereign and subject (interpreted in this research as loyalty to one's organization) strengthens the positive effect of organizational commitment on willingness to report, and (2) individuals' ethical disposition on trust between friends strengthens the negative effect of interpersonal closeness with the wrongdoer on willingness to report.