Supervisor Moral Talk Contagion and Trust-in-Supervisor

Abstract

This message-production experiment demonstrates that supervisors can mitigate the workplace moral mum effect and encourage upward ethical dissent by talking about ethics with subordinates (i.e., moral talk contagion). Working adults (N = 324) were randomly assigned to respond to an unethical request by their supervisor in one of five scenarios that varied by supervisor talk type and trust-in-supervisor or a baseline-control condition. Content and contingency table analyses revealed participants were twice as likely to invoke explicitly moralized upward dissent to an unethical business request from a supervisor when the supervisor was known for describing work situations in ethical terms. In addition, the V-shaped relationship between trust-in-supervisor and upward ethical dissent indicated that participants in the high- and low-trust conditions were twice as likely to engage in upward ethical dissent as those in the baseline-control condition. Implications for theory and practice conclude the essay.