The Effect of IT Failure Impact and Personal Morality on IT Project Reporting Behavior

An individual's reluctance to report the actual status of a troubled project has recently received research attention as an important contributor to project failure. While there are a variety of factors influencing the reluctance to report, prior information systems research has focused on only situational factors such as risk, information asymmetry, and time pressure involved in the given situation. In this paper, we examine the effects of both situational and personal factors on an individual's reporting behavior within the rubric of the basic whistle-blowing model adapted from Dozier and Miceli . Specifically, we identify perceived impact of information technology (IT) failure as a situational factor and personal morality and willingness to communicate as personal factors, and investigate their effects on the assessments and decisions that individuals make about reporting the IT project's status. Based on the results of a controlled laboratory experiment, we found that perceived impact of IT failure directly affects an individual's assessment of whether a troubled project's status ought to be reported, exerting an indirect influence on willingness to report bad news, and that personal morality directly affects all three steps in the basic whistle-blowing model, as hypothesized. Willingness to communicate, however, was found not to affect an individual's willingness to report bad news. The implications of these findings and directions for future research are discussed.