Question: If you discovered your manager was breaking the company’s code of conduct, what would you do?

Alternative Question Phrasing:

If you discovered your supervisor was breaking the company’s code of conduct, what would you do?

Follow-up questions:

What approach will you use and why?
How do you think management would react based on your actions?
How would you execute your next actions?
What do you think would be the implications of your actions?
How would you confront your manager?
How would you or what would you do to become a whistleblower?
Would you confront your manager directly or escalate it to your manager’s manager?

Question Details:

Question Type:

Situational

Abilities:

Cognitive – Category Flexibility (Mental Flexibility),Cognitive – Flexibility of Closure (Pattern Detection)

Other Factors:

Big 5 – Agreeableness,Motivation/Ambition/Aspiration,Personality-Job Fit,Personality-Organization Fit,Personality-Team Fit,Practical Intelligence (Street Smarts)

Work Activity (Task):

Information Input – Identifying Objects, Actions, and Events,Mental Processes – Analyzing Data or Information,Mental Processes – Judging the Value of Things, Services, or People,Mental Processes – Making Decisions and Solving Problems

Work Style (Person-Job Fit):

Assertiveness/Courage,Integrity/Honesty/Ethics

Question Frequency

Question Difficulty

What to look for in an answer:

Primarily look for honesty and integrity in the interviewee. This may be hard as some interviewees may give the perceived model answer of whistleblowing in some form or another, but not actually do as they say in a real-life scenario. Try to push the interviewee to elaborate more and get them talking about how they imagine confronting the manager or whistleblowing would actually look like to test their resolve in doing the honest thing.

Red Flags to Watch For:

The inability to see what their manager did is wrong is a definite red flag. The ability or inability to confront the manager or to whistleblow in some other way is not necessarily a red flag and can be situationally dependent.

Sample Answer:

N/A

Question Source: Unknown