The Many Facets of Workplace Moral Courage: Development and Validation of a Multidimensional Scale

ABSTRACT In the battle against unethical behavior in organizations, fostering employees' moral courage proves vital beyond conventional regulation and compliance efforts. To propel this frontier and empower individuals to uphold moral values, a robust measure of workplace moral courage becomes imperative. This paper introduces the Workplace Moral Courage Scale (WMCS), which, unlike previous measures, stands out by capturing the diverse ways in which moral courage can manifest in workplace settings. Building on data from two diverse German employee samples (total N = 995), we unveil five distinct factors: challenging colleague and supervisor misconduct, opposing unethical orders, confessing mistakes, and initiating positive changes. The WMCS exhibits good psychometric properties and convergent and discriminant validity. Confirming its concurrent validity, the WMCS effectively predicts various forms of employee silence, even after controlling for organizational influences. The paper concludes with a discussion of the results and implications of the WMCS.