Moral Courage Fostering Bystander Intervention Against Workplace Bullying: Findings from an Exploratory Study with a Video-Vignette Procedure

Scholars are increasingly considering bystander intervention as a behavior that could be an effective solution to stopworkplace bullying. Among the factors leading bystanders to intervene, scholars hypothesized that moral courage is akey concept supporting intervention. In this paper, an exploratory study is conducted to investigate the relationshipbetween moral courage and bystander intervention against workplace bullying. This study follows an innovative designin which the stimulus is a video-vignette representing an episode of workplace bullying. Moral courage was assessedusing an ad hoc constructed scale for moral courage at work (Moral Courage at Work scale – MC@W scale), whilebystander intervention was assessed along the dimensions of personal involvement and immediacy following BowesSperry and O’Leary-Kelly’s indications (2005). A positive relationship was found between moral courage and bystanderintervention, although results do not evidently support this main hypothesis. Taking as a moderator the engagementevoked by the video-stimulus, results showed that people with high-moral courage scores are more likely to manifestintervention with high-personal involvement. Despite the limitations of this study, results provide preliminary indicationsabout the complex link between moral courage and bystander intervention, which needs further investigation. Thiscontribution is included in the line of research seeking to understand how to mobilize bystanders in organizations. Inthis sense, actions and training programs could be planned to improve employees’ moral courage and consequentlypromote interventions against bullying and a better organizational environment.