Can unethical organizational climates thwart the potential of empowering leadership to promote employee moral courage and whistleblowing? Individual Research & Mentoring Opportunities Spring 2024 Accepted AreaOrganizational Behavior, Human Resource Management, Applied Psychology, Industrial-organizational Psychology, Leadership Despite the frequency of massive ethical scandals across organizations in both recent and distant history (e.g., WellsFargo, Volkswagen, Theranos), our understanding of why they happen, or how they could be prevented, remains scant. In this project, I propose that supervisor empowering leadership could be a potentially powerful tool for leaders to promote employee moral courage and, ultimately, ethical voice (or whistleblowing) in organizations. However, organizational workplace climates can have strong, coercive effects on employees, potentially thwarting empowering leadership’s positive impact on employees. Thus, I am also interested in examining people’s perceptions of corporate/organizational (unethical) workplace climates as a potential qualifier of the empowering leadership-employee moral courage relationship. Interestingly, preliminary data I collected reveal that the positive relationship between empowering leadership and moral courage is entirely neutralized when unethical pro-organizational climate is high (vs. low). I intend to further explore and corroborate this finding by running additional studies. This project contributes to both the empowering leadership, leadership training, and business ethics literatures by providing insights into the factors that can drive, or thwart, employee ethical behavior, such as whistleblowing. Tobias Dennerlein Required Literature research, setting up surveys on Qualtrics.com, data collection/cleaning, etc. Highly intrinsically motivated, great attention to detail, very well-organized, being a self-starter, having a growth mindset, ideally (but not required) have some experience with research and an affinity to numbers, ideally (but not required) have an above average GPA. 6 20 (estimated)