Research on sharing positives at work-including workplace capitalization, self-promotion, and pride displays-has converged on important insights about the benefits and detriments of supervisors sharing their successes, abilities, and other performance-related attainments. Beyond this realm of capitalizing on their performance excellence, supervisors also have interests in capitalizing on their moral excellence. However, sharing their personal involvement in facilitating positive moral events at work-supervisor self-focused moral capitalization-has the distinct potential to morally elevate their employees but also make uniquely distasteful impressions. Indeed, calling attention to one's own morality can convey a holier-than-thou image, marred by self-superiority, virtue signaling, and disingenuousness. Accordingly, we theorize how and why supervisors' self-focused moral capitalization may invite employee moral elevation-feeling uplifted by a supervisor's moral purity-but also its oppositional counterpart, employee disgust, feeling repulsed by a supervisor's moral impurity. Drawing on theory regarding moral emotions, we unpack this tension and important countervailing implications for employee citizenship behavior. We also theorize that supervisors can tip employee outcomes toward moral elevation and improved citizenship-and away from disgust and diminished citizenship-by sharing the spotlight, specifically as they capitalize on others' involvement in positive moral events. In a field study of 254 supervisor-employee dyads and an experiment involving 233 employees, we found that supervisor self-focused moral capitalization was positively related to employee moral elevation and, in turn, increased citizenship. However, for supervisors who engaged in less other-focused moral capitalization, supervisor self-focused moral capitalization instead triggered employee disgust and decreased citizenship behavior. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
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