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

Dal Cason, Davide [ULB] Casini, Annalisa [UCL] Hellemans, Catherine [ULB]

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