Seeking justice: Inequitable management compensation and employee whistleblowing

Abstract

Prompted by high pay disparity within firms, many employees have raised concerns about the equity of management compensation. This study examines the relation between employees’ perceptions of inequitable management compensation and their whistleblowing behavior. We expect that when employees feel more strongly that management compensation is inequitable and unjust, they are more motivated to blow the whistle on potential management misconduct. Consistent with this expectation, we find that firms with higher CEO pay ratios are more likely to experience employee whistleblowing of alleged misconduct in the following year. This positive association is stronger when employees are more likely to perceive a high CEO pay ratio as being unjust. We also provide several tests to mitigate concerns about alternative explanations based on corporate culture or underlying fraud and to support the assumptions underlying our arguments. In addition, our results are robust to alternative measures of within-firm pay disparity. Overall, our findings identify potentially positive aspects of high pay disparity within a firm because its employees are more motivated to monitor management through whistleblowing.