Whistleblowing: Two Case Study From Turkey

Whistleblowing can describe that convey to peoples who have authority to solve the unethical or illegal case or situation. Whistleblowing is divided into two form of construction as formal whistleblowing and informal whistleblowing. When whistleblower using formal whistleblowing, he/she make an application to official authorities while he/she transmits a criminal case or situation. But when he/she prefer informal whistleblowing type, he/she convey this situation to people who he/she knows and trust as verbally. As sub-branch from this whistleblowing types are divided into three groups. These are; be silent, internal whistleblowing and external whistleblowing. In the be the silent type of whistleblowing, an employee is aware of must be reported case but due to various reasons he/she choose to be silent and not doing anything. As the main reason for this is he/she doesn’t want to stigma as the rat, or he/she doesn’t trust own organization. Internal whistleblowing is illegal and unethical situation reported by an employee to top authority in the organization. However, if the employee thinks that organization doesn t approach to solve in this matter, he/she resort to external whistleblowing. At external whistleblowing, employee report illegal and unethical situation to the authorized establishment outside of the organization as the court, media, police, etc.When we come to about a situations that we must announce, we make an application to whistleblowing when a case that disturb the society’s health and safety, an event like theft or fraud, the states against to ethics, manners, moral values, laws, legal regulations and government policy, a discrimination about gender, nationality, religion and race. If we summarize every topic that provides public welfare is entering to whistleblowing content.Some factors are affecting to whistleblowing. Hassink, Vries, and Bolle (2007;29-30) were separated five categories to this. We can categorize this as psychological factors, ethics and cultural factors, corporate or structural factors, retaliation or revenge and lastly the type of misapplication.There are some dangers to the whistleblower. In the beginning, there ıs the retaliation movements intended for the whistleblower. These retaliation movements are in seven ways. Firstly orientation towards whistleblower. In this process whistleblower highlight than a criminal case and there is an attack for professional competence, reliability, and privacy of the whistleblower. Another retaliation movement is producing a weak record. In this process, people who make illegal work are starts producing fake documents for showing that whistleblower is problematic and inadequate employment. Another retaliation movement is force whistleblower to silence with threatening. As you can understand from the name, in this stage, people who do illegal works prevents announce to the illegal case of the whistleblower with the various threat. Another retaliation movement is perform mobbing to the whistleblower. Their purpose in this stage is working for whistleblower will be fired. Another retaliation movement is making a failure. In this widespread retaliation movement, they try to make whistleblower unsuccessful while they give a lot of work that he/she can’t make. Another retaliation movement is sue to the whistleblower. Whistleblower experiences mostly this retaliation movement and he/she accused with the reason that he/she attainment documents without illegal ways. Last retaliation movement is destroying whistleblower’s career. In this process, the whistleblower will be fired, and they are trying to prevent he/she get a job while they give a negative reference for him/her.The organization must create an effective whistleblowing policy for prevention the dangers that we said above. For this the organization must what to do, can align as senior management must be determined, education, communication, ombudsman bureau, control and check, reward, punishment, protection, written codes and rules, the result must be announced with fair investigation process and right information transfer to public opinion.In this study, we tried to tell whistleblowing stories of Samet Kuşçu and Mahir Kaynak who report military coup attempt in Turkey.