Moral leadership is defined as “the demonstration of normatively appropriate conduct through personal actions and interpersonal relationships, and the promotion of such conduct to followers through two-way communication, reinforcement, and decision making” (Brown et al., 2005, p. 120). Numerous scholars have demonstrated the positive influence of moral leadership on employees’ moral decision making (Al Halbusi et al., 2021; Huang et al., 2021; Ko et al., 2018; Zeng & Xu, 2020). As such, managers of organizations are increasingly focusing on regulating and shaping employees’ work attitudes and behaviors through cultivating moral leadership in practice.

Extant research on moral leadership can be distinguished as taking one of two perspectives. Some studies have stated that moral leadership plays a significant role in promoting desirable employee attitudes and behaviors. For example, moral leadership can stimulate employees’ voice behaviors and organizational citizenship behaviors (Al Halbusi et al., 2021; Zeng & Xu, 2020). Other studies have revealed a negative relationship between moral leadership and employees’ unethical behaviors, including counterproductive work behaviors and opportunistic behaviors (Huang et al., 2021; Ko et al., 2018).

Despite quite prolific research on moral leadership, several aspects still require further exploration. First, there are many previous studies in which the impacts of moral leadership on employees’ conduct have been examined (Huang et al., 2021; Hsieh et al., 2020; Ko et al., 2018). Few scholars have investigated the relationship between moral leadership and employees’ workplace incivility (Young et al., 2021). Workplace incivility refers to a kind of deviant behavior at work with ambiguous harmful intentions and low intensity (Andersson & Pearson, 1999). Incivility at work not only destroys the interpersonal norms among organization members but also leads to the accumulation of negative emotions among employees (Chen & Wang, 2019; Cortina et al., 2017). To date, there has been little research on whether leaders’ moral behavior can reduce such insidiously deviant behavior as workplace incivility among employees (Young et al., 2021). Second, researchers have introduced several mechanisms, such as ethical climate and ethical efficacy, to explain how moral leadership affects employees’ behavior at both the team and individual levels (Lee et al., 2017; Shin, 2012). However, few studies have paid attention to factors in employees’ cognition (e.g., moral tolerance). Moral tolerance refers to “the extent to which one considers ethically questionable behaviors acceptable” (Xie et al., 2022, p. 2). It reflects an individual’s morality. In the extant research, it is still unclear if moral leadership can indirectly affect employees’ behavior by affecting their moral tolerance.

To address the above gaps in the literature, we drew on social information processing theory to uncover the potential influence of moral leadership on employees’ workplace incivility. According to social information processing theory, individuals can adjust their attitudes and behaviors to meet others’ requirements based on the information they capture from others (Salancik & Pfeffer, 1978). Thus, we argued that leaders can be regarded as the primary transmitters of information in an organization. Employees can capture the information that the leader’s moral actions conveys to them, such as setting a moral example and establishing moral rewards and punishments in the organization. As such, employees may form their moral tolerance on the basis of processing this information, and may further reduce their workplace incivility. Furthermore, social information processing theory states that individuals’ processing of information will be affected by the credibility of the information resource (Lau & Liden, 2008). Leader trustworthiness refers to the level of trust employees have in their leaders (Rousseau et al., 1998), and reflects employees’ perception of their leader’s dependability, which may play an important role in affecting the process by which employees interpret information they receive from their leader. Thus, we speculated that employees who perceive their leader as highly trustworthy may be more susceptible to moral leadership, and may further adjust their moral cognition and behavior. Therefore, we introduced employees’ perception of leader trustworthiness as a crucial moderator in our research and argued that it may intensify the impact of moral leadership on employee workplace incivility. Overall, we proposed a theoretical model and aimed to extend the existing literature by exploring the mediating role of moral tolerance and the moderating role of leader trustworthiness in the influence of moral leadership on employees’ workplace incivility (see Figure 1).

Moral Leadership and Employees’ Workplace Incivility

According to previous research, moral leadership involves not only being a moral person but also being a moral manager (Brown et al., 2005). That is, moral leaders are honest and reliable, and also require subordinates to follow the standard of moral behavior in the organization through setting the rules to guide and regulate behavior. Researchers have suggested that when employees perceive their leaders as moral, they tend to be more satisfied with their leaders and decrease their immoral behavior at work (Huang et al., 2021; Ko et al., 2018). As already described, workplace incivility is a low-intensity deviant behavior with latent harmful intentions (Andersson & Pearson, 1999). It violates the principle of mutual respect and leads to a rise in employees’ turnover intention (Lim et al., 2008).

Brown et al. (2005) suggested that employees are prone to looking outside themselves to significant others, especially leaders, for ethical guidance. Therefore, we argued that moral leadership may negatively affect employees’ workplace incivility for two reasons. First, drawing on social information processing theory, the social environment will affect an individual’s cognition construction and behavior. That is, individuals construct their psychological perceptions, attitudes, or behaviors based on the information in the social environment (Lau & Liden, 2008). Leaders are the main information source for employees in the organization. Employees adjust their work attitudes and behaviors according to information that the leader’s behavior conveys (Hon & Lu, 2016). In this context, moral leaders are inclined to provide punishment for immoral actions as well as rewards for moral actions in the organization. These systems can send signals to employees that organizations prefer to encourage civility and discourage incivility, which further elicits employees to interpret that engaging in incivility will bring them adverse consequences. As a result, employees are more likely to reduce their workplace incivility in this social environment. Second, leaders’ performance of moral behavior based on fairness, integrity, and friendliness in the organization makes it easier for employees to identify with their work. Thus, employees tend to choose a positive way to give back to leaders, thus reducing the incidence of workplace incivility. Therefore, we proposed the following hypothesis:
Hypothesis 1: Moral leadership will be negatively related to employees’ workplace incivility.

The Mediating Role of Moral Tolerance

The higher the level of people’s moral tolerance, the greater is their acceptance of immoral behavior and the lower their standard of morality. Researchers have stated that moral tolerance can be affected by personal characteristics, organizational culture, organizational atmosphere, and social consensus (Hayibor & Wasieleski, 2009; Reiss & Mitra, 1998; Sweeney et al., 2010).

We assumed that moral leadership may affect employees’ workplace incivility through influencing their moral tolerance. According to social information processing theory, moral leaders are prone to convey two kinds of information to employees in the process of interpersonal interaction. On the one hand, their intolerance of unethical behaviors and advocation of ethical behaviors can convey to employees that incivility is not allowed in the organization (Khuntia & Suar, 2004). On the other hand, when leaders punish employees for violating moral norms or reward employees for implementing moral behaviors, other workers may account for these actions, and recognize that employing incivility that breaches moral codes will cause detrimental impacts to the individual who does so. Moral leaders can promote organization members to reach an organizational consensus that unethical behavior is unacceptable, and this consensus can reduce employees’ moral tolerance (Hayibor & Wasieleski, 2009). Further, the decrease in moral tolerance reflects improvement of employees’ morality and this change in cognition motivates employees to avoid workplace incivility. Different from other deviant behavior, workplace incivility is low-intensity and its negative impacts are often ignored by the enactor (Cortina et al., 2017). However, as moral tolerance decreases, employees become more sensitive to the immoral behavior. Thus, we argued that employees who possess low moral tolerance are more likely than are those who possess high moral tolerance to reduce their workplace incivility.

Consequently, we expected that moral tolerance would play a mediating role in the relationship between moral leadership and employees’ workplace incivility. Leaders’ values and philosophy can guide employees to construct new cognitions, and further affect how employees behave (Hon & Lu, 2016). As such, moral leadership may affect employees’ moral cognition of the acceptability of unethical behavior, and then exert a suppressive effect on their workplace incivility. Therefore, we proposed the following hypothesis:
Hypothesis 2: Moral tolerance will mediate the relationship between moral leadership and employees’ workplace incivility.

The Moderating Role of Leader Trustworthiness

Mayer et al. (1995) proposed that employees’ perception of leader trustworthiness can influence their perception and judgment of the leader’s ability, integrity, and benevolence. Compared to employees who do not perceive their leaders as trustworthy, those who have trust in their leader are more likely to affirm their ability and respond positively to the leader’s moral values. Thus, it is becoming increasingly meaningful for leaders that employees perceive them as trustworthy (Ogbeibu et al., 2021).

Social information processing theory points out that the credibility of the source of information affects the extent to which employees utilize the information in forming their social cognitions (Lau & Liden, 2008). In our study, given that leaders can be regarded as important information sources for employees, the extent to which employees utilize the information conveyed by leaders’ behavior depends on leaders’ trustworthiness. Therefore, we argued that employees’ perception of leader trustworthiness may affect their judgment of the leader’s behaviors. When employees perceive their leader as trustworthy, it is more likely that the leader’s moral values and behavior will influence the employees, and they will adjust their moral tolerance and workplace incivility accordingly. In particular, employees who perceive their leader as highly trustworthy are more likely to affirm the morality and punishment system that the moral leader establishes in the organization. Further, employees with this perception of their leader will be inclined to capture the organizational consensus that unethical behavior is not allowed, which can decrease their tolerance of unethical behavior as well as its implementation. In addition, employees are willing to accept leaders who respect and care about them. Thus, when employees perceive their leaders as trustworthy, they are prone to accept the values of moral leaders and subsequently adjust their work behaviors. Hence, we proposed that when employees perceive their leaders as trustworthy, the negative impacts of leaders’ moral behavior on their moral tolerance and workplace incivility may be strengthened. Accordingly, if employees perceive leaders as untrustworthy, they may find it hard to accept leaders’ moral values (Dirks & Ferrin, 2002), which may alter the influences of moral leadership on their moral tolerance and workplace incivility. As a result, we proposed the following hypotheses:
Hypothesis 3: Employees’ perception of leader trustworthiness will moderate the relationship between moral leadership and employees’ moral tolerance, such that the negative relationship will be stronger when perceived leader trustworthiness is high rather than low.
Hypothesis 4: Employees’ perception of leader trustworthiness will moderate the relationship between moral leadership and employees’ workplace incivility, such that the negative relationship will be stronger when perceived leader trustworthiness is high rather than low.

Method

Participants and Procedure

We collected data via a survey conducted with textile processing company employees and their immediate leaders at a facility located in Shandong, China. After obtaining approval from the Ethical Review Board of Beijing Jiaotong University, we invited the staff of the company’s human resources department to post a WeChat workgroup notice to the employees working in research and development, production, and operation departments, in which the investigation was introduced and we inquired about participation intention. As a result, we received positive responses from 522 employees, and further recruited them and their leaders as survey participants. Before the formal survey began, we introduced the research purposes to all participants, assured them of confidentiality, confirmed that their anonymity would be protected, and obtained their informed consent.

To minimize the potential for common method bias, we prepared two different versions of the survey for the participants: one for employees and one for leaders. We asked employees to provide their assessment of moral leadership, moral tolerance, and leader trustworthiness; leaders evaluated employees’ workplace incivility. Finally, the research team obtained valid data from 427 employees and 88 leaders. Overall, 268 were men (62.76%) and 159 were women (37.24%). The average age was 38.22 years (SD = 10.37, range = 20–59). The average organizational tenure was 6.59 years (SD = 6.55, range = 0.17–30.00). Regarding educational level, 28.10% had obtained a junior high school degree or below, 43.56% had a high school degree, 18.74% had a junior college degree, and 9.60% had a bachelor’s degree or above.

Measures

Because all the measures we used in this study were originally developed in English, back-translation was used to create accurate and understandable Chinese versions. Specifically, we invited a bilingual management associate professor to translate all the scales from English into Chinese. A Chinese English-language professor then translated them back into English to examine the consistency. All items were rated on a 7-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (completely disagree) to 7 (completely agree).

Moral Leadership
Employees reported their perception of leaders’ moral behavior using a 10-item scale developed by Brown et al. (2005). A sample item is “My leader sets an example of how to do things the right way in terms of ethics.” Cronbach’s alpha for our study was .96.

Moral Tolerance
We measured moral tolerance with the five-item scale developed by Van Kleef et al. (2011). Employees were asked to what extent they accepted that colleagues were unsocial, immoral, impolite, and rude in the organization (reverse scored). Cronbach’s alpha for our study was .83.

Workplace Incivility
Leaders provided ratings of their subordinates’ workplace incivility using a seven-item scale developed by Cortina et al. (2001). A sample item is “This employee pays little attention to colleagues’ statements and shows little interest in colleagues’ opinions.” Cronbach’s alpha for our study was .96.

Leader Trustworthiness
From the scale developed by Mayer and Davis (1999), we selected nine items to assess ability, integrity, and friendliness, as a measure of employees’ trust in leaders. Sample items are “My leader is very competent” (ability), “My leader has a strong sense of justice” (integrity), and “My leader will try his best to help me” (friendliness). Cronbach’s alpha for our study was .96.

Control Variables
A prior study indicated that employees’ gender, age, education level, and organizational tenure can affect their workplace incivility (Lim et al., 2008). Therefore, we controlled for these variables.

Results

Confirmatory Factor Analysis

To analyze the discriminant validity of our measures, we used Mplus (Version 7.4) to perform a confirmatory factor analysis. The fit of the four-factor model (moral leadership, moral tolerance, leader trustworthiness, and workplace incivility) was significantly better than other alternative models (see Table 1), which shows that these four variables involved in the theoretical model have good discriminant validity.

Descriptive Statistics

Table 2 summarizes the means, standard deviations, and correlations of the study variables. As expected, moral leadership was negatively associated with both moral tolerance and workplace incivility. Moral tolerance was positively related to workplace incivility.

Hypothesis Testing

In this study we used PROCESS 3.4 Model 8 to analyze the impact of moral leadership on workplace incivility (Hayes, 2018). The results indicate that moral leadership had a significant and negative impact on employees’ workplace incivility. Thus, Hypothesis 1 was supported. In addition, we observed a negative impact of moral leadership on employees’ moral tolerance, as well as a positive influence of moral tolerance on workplace incivility. The mediating role moral tolerance played in the relationship between moral leadership and workplace incivility was significant, with a 95% confidence interval that excluded zero, supporting Hypothesis 2 (see Table 3). Moreover, the interaction between moral leadership and leader trustworthiness was negatively related to moral tolerance and workplace incivility; thus, Hypotheses 3 and 4 were supported.

We further conducted a simple slope analysis to intuitively reflect the moderating role of leader trustworthiness. As shown in Figure 2, compared with a low level of leader trustworthiness, a high level of leader trustworthiness significantly enhanced the negative impact of moral leadership on employees’ moral tolerance. Similarly, Figure 3 shows that a high level of leader trustworthiness significantly amplified the negative influence of moral leadership on employees’ workplace incivility.

Discussion

Drawing on social information processing theory, we constructed a model to explain the relationship between moral leadership and employees’ workplace incivility. The findings indicate that moral leadership reduced employees’ workplace incivility, and moral tolerance played a mediating role in this relationship. Furthermore, perceived leader trustworthiness strengthened the influence of moral leadership on moral tolerance as well as its impact on workplace incivility.

Theoretical Implications

This study has several theoretical implications. First, we extended the moral leadership literature by empirically examining the negative effect of moral leadership on employees’ workplace incivility. Although researchers have identified the positive effect of moral leadership on regulating employees’ behavior in the workplace in numerous studies (Hsieh et al., 2020; Mo & Shi, 2017; Zeng & Xu, 2020), only a small amount of research exploring its impact on employees’ incivility has yet been undertaken. By verifying the impact of moral leadership on workplace incivility, this study was also a response to the call by Schilpzand et al. (2014) to extend the line of research on the antecedents of workplace incivility.

Second, we have extended knowledge regarding the conditions underpinning the relationship between moral leadership and employees’ workplace incivility by examining the mediating role of moral tolerance. To reveal the mechanisms of how moral leadership affects employees’ behavior, previous researchers have investigated several mediators, such as moral efficacy and ethical climate (Lee et al., 2017; Shin, 2012). However, few empirical studies have explored the mediating role that moral tolerance plays in the effects of moral leadership on employees’ behavior. By responding to the call to explore various alternative mediators (Lee et al., 2017), we have provided a more comprehensive picture to explain the contribution of moral leadership to employee behavior.

Third, we introduced employees’ perception of leader trustworthiness as the boundary condition of the influence of moral leadership on workplace incivility. Although researchers had previously examined employees’ characteristics, cultural values, and organizational climate in amplifying or shrinking the impact of moral leadership on employees’ behavior (Kacmar et al., 2011; Neubert et al., 2013), far less attention has been paid to investigation of how employees’ perception of leaders’ characteristics affects the above process (Shakeel et al., 2019), particularly concerning leader trustworthiness. Thus, our findings suggest that when employees perceive their leaders as trustworthy, moral leadership has greater impacts on employees’ moral tolerance and workplace incivility, which provides meaningful insight into understanding the effects of moral leadership.

Practical Implications

This study has several practical implications for organizations. First, the results show that moral leadership inhibited employees’ workplace incivility, which will encourage paying attention to the cultivation of leaders’ morals in organizations. For instance, recruitment staff can investigate the morality of candidates in the leader recruitment process, and confirm if they have the potential to be moral leaders. Moreover, training programs can be carried out to actively improve existing leaders’ morality, cultivate their moral awareness, and encourage them to play a moral exemplary role in the organization.

Second, the results show that moral leadership decreased employees’ workplace incivility by reducing their moral tolerance. This suggests that managers of organizations should pay attention to diminishing employees’ tolerance of immoral behaviors in the workplace, such as incivility. In particular, managers are encouraged to apply various approaches to make employees aware of the harmful outcomes that immoral behavior can bring to the organization as well as to themselves. As such, managers can publicize the punishments for immoral behavior as well as the rewards for constructive and moral behavior throughout the organization, encouraging employees to say no to immoral behaviors.

Third, the results show that when employees perceive their leader as trustworthy, the impact of moral leadership on employees’ moral tolerance and workplace incivility is enhanced. This finding suggests that to maximize the effectiveness of moral leadership, leaders should strengthen their trustworthiness in the eyes of employees. Thus, they can actively display their professional skills and leadership talents to employees, treat all employees equally, and provide enough consideration for the needs of employees, which are actions conducive to building and increasing employees’ trust in them. By shaping the image of being trustworthy, leaders can enhance their positive influence in guiding employees’ behavior.

Limitations and Suggestions for Future Research

This research has several limitations. First, we conducted a cross-sectional study to verify the theoretical model, which does not allow for inferences of causality. Future researchers could apply a longitudinal design to draw more accurate research conclusions. Second, given that we asked leaders to rate their subordinates’ workplace incivility and each of the leaders needed to rate several subordinates, this may have introduced same-source bias. Furthermore, because of the low-intensity nature of incivility, leaders may not become aware of an employee’s incivility as easily as the employee’s colleagues do. Thus, future researchers could match employees with a colleague and collect data on incivility from the colleague’s perspective. Third, we demonstrated the mediating role of employees’ moral tolerance and the moderating role of perceived leader trustworthiness at the individual level. Future researchers could explore other alternative mechanisms and boundary conditions when studying the relationship between moral leadership and employees’ workplace incivility. Finally, our data were collected from one company in China; thus, the findings may be limited to this specific organizational and cultural context. In future studies, researchers could validate the hypothesized model with more diverse samples.

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Siyuan Chen, School of Economics and Management, Beijing Jiaotong University, No. 3 Shangyuan Village, Haidian District, Beijing, People’s Republic of China. Email: [email protected]