Abstract
Moral courage is a competency exercised in the workplace as employees face ethical challenges with a moral response. Managers exert considerable effort to foster subordinates’ moral courage given its positive organisational consequences. However abusive supervision, not uncommon in the organisational context, negatively affects moral courage. The purpose of this article is to examine the relationship between abusive supervision and moral courage as well as to test the moderating roles of moral efficacy and moral attentiveness on that very relationship. Data were collected from six public hospitals in Pakistan. The sample included 359 nurses and 121 nurse heads. The moderating roles were tested using the moderated hierarchical regression analysis. Results revealed that there was a significant negative relationship between abusive supervision and moral courage. In addition, this very relation was weaker when both moral efficacy and moral attentiveness were higher than when they were lower. The study provided new insights into the influence that abusive supervision might have on nurses’ moral courage and it also offered a practical assistance to employees in the health care industry and their leaders that moral efficacy and moral attentiveness would act as neutralisers in mitigating the pernicious effect of abusive supervision on nurses’ moral courage.
Highlights
The nursing profession has been associated with irregular working hours, high work load, rising job demands, and emotional complexity (Pisaniello, Winefield, & Delfabbro, 2012; Qian et al, 2015), and studies have suggested that nurses show more psychological and physical stress symptoms and mental health problems than individuals from other occupations (Bakker et al, 2000; Qian et al, 2015)
The results show that both moral efficacy and moral attentiveness moderated that effect of abusive supervision on nurses’ moral courage, supporting Hypothesis 2 and Hypothesis 3
This study found that when subordinates were high in moral efficacy, the negative effect of abusive supervision on subordinates’ moral courage weakened
Summary
The nursing profession has been associated with irregular working hours, high work load, rising job demands, and emotional complexity (Pisaniello, Winefield, & Delfabbro, 2012; Qian et al, 2015), and studies have suggested that nurses show more psychological and physical stress symptoms and mental health problems than individuals from other occupations (Bakker et al, 2000; Qian et al, 2015). Nurses often encounter ethically-laden situations in their clinical practice that conflict with their B. Working with incompetent health care personnel, organisational constraints, unsafe working conditions, emergency situations, and inadequate staffing have contributed to the rise of ethical dilemmas encountered by nurses which can decrease their capacity to be morally courageous (Comrie, 2012). Moral courage is an important virtue in nursing that contributes to the personal and professional development of a nurse. Moral courage is the person’s ability to overcome fear, to stand up to their own values and principles, to listen and be an advocate despite conflicting obligations (Murray, 2010)
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