The Effect of Moral Intensity on It Employees’ Bad News Reporting

Safety critical systems can cause injury or death to people if they malfunction, and thus it is of vital importance for employees to report bugs in such systems. Based on the notions of moral intensity and morality judgment, we propose a model that explains employees’ intentions to report bugs in safety critical systems. We conducted a conjoint experiment to test the model. Based on data from 173 software engineers, we found that morality judgment plays a key role in mediating the relationship between moral intensity and bad news reporting. Specifically, we found that two dimensions of moral intensity—magnitude of consequences and probability of effect—exert both direct and indirect effects on the willingness to report bad news. Further, we found that two other dimensions of moral intensity—temporal immediacy and proximity to victims—do not exert direct effects, but influence bad news reporting indirectly through morality judgment.