When Attitudes Aren’t Enough: Capability, Conviction, and Whistleblowing Intent in Taiwan’s Public Sector

Whistleblowing is widely modeled through the additive logic of attitudes, subjective norms, and behavioral control, yet treating the attitude-intent link as uniform across organizational settings sits uneasily with what we know about voice in bureaucracies. Building on organizational voice theory to extend the theory of planned behavior, we ask under what conditions positive attitudes toward whistleblowing translate into reporting intent. Using the 2016 Taiwan Government Bureaucrats Survey (N = 1,004), we apply elastic-net variable selection followed by HC3 OLS to identify the conditional structure of whistleblowing intent. Two moderators emerge: perceived whistleblowing inefficacy strengthens rather than weakens the attitude-intent link (a committed-minority effect, our most robust finding), and organizational skill amplifies it (a capability pathway). Where civil servants doubt the system, the attitude-intent link is steepest; where they trust it, even modest attitudes are enough. Findings suggest that Taiwan’s 2025 Public Interest Whistleblower Protection Act may need to build perceived efficacy and organizational capability, not legal shielding alone, if civic conviction is to translate into reporting intent.