Moral leadership and employee workplace incivility: The roles of moral tolerance and leader trustworthiness

Drawing on social information processing theory, we conducted a cross-sectional study to explore how moral leadership affects employees’ workplace incivility. We tested our theoretical model with a sample of 427 employees of a Chinese textile processing company and 88 of their immediate leaders. The results indicate that moral leadership was negatively related to employees’ workplace incivility, and moral tolerance partially mediated the relationship between moral leadership and workplace incivility. Furthermore, a high level of perceived leader trustworthiness amplified the negative impact of moral leadership on both employees’ moral tolerance and workplace incivility. This study will help organizations to understand how moral leadership affects employees’ workplace incivility and guide the managers to take effective measures to deal with such behaviors.