| This study examines the experiences of public leader whistleblowers who were targets of employer retaliation and who also experienced posttraumatic growth. When circumstances are such that a person comes forward in an organization, they can be exposed to biological, psychological, and sociological factors that contribute to intensified and prolonged psychological stress. Much of the research into the whistleblower experience has focused on the pervasive devastation that such retaliation inflicts on these employees' lives. In the highly politicized government agencies, whistleblowers are particularly vulnerable to professional ostracization (Nezlek, Wesselmann, Wheeler, & Williams, 2012). Many of them endure lifelong struggles to 1, recover emotionally and professionally, although---as demonstrated in this study---some do succeed in reclaiming their lives. To date there has been little research on this resilient population or the biopsychosocial recovery trajectories they follow.;This mixed methods study used in-depth interviews (Weiss, 1994) with a purposive sample of public leader whistleblowers. Although it was not planned, serendipitously all the participants turned out to have experienced posttraumatic growth (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 1995), and this informed the direction of the study. Respondents also completed the Posttraumatic Growth Inventory (PTGI) (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 1996) to quantitatively assess their posttraumatic growth. Triangulating respondents' PTGI scores with analyses of their narratives of self-restoration yielded accounts of how they moved from a space of "choiceless choice, stuck in static time, and living in the position of the dead" (Alford, 2001a, p. 38) following a five-stage trajectory of positive psychological growth to cognitive and social reintegration.;The study's second principal finding is the centrality of the respondents' values to their role of public leadership. This finding illuminates the importance of the alignment between the respondents' personally held system of beliefs and ethical-moral tenets of public leadership in their willingness to promote the well-being of people and community by relinquishing self for service-to-others (Perry, 1996, 2008). The data suggest that the respondents' personally held convictions and their "privilege to serve" orientation are psychologically bound by their need for autonomy to perform their roles. Their loss of professional autonomy after becoming whistleblowers was a major component in their trauma experiences. |
