This study introduces Duty to Dignity at Work (DDW) as a novel construct that captures employees' volition to refrain from disrespecting others, addressing the gaps in existing literature on workplace dignity and moral duty. By integrating interactional justice literature with Kantian ethics, DDW emphasizes the importance of individual agency and responsibility in upholding dignity from a proscriptive perspective. A partial nomological network was developed to validate DDW's relationships with abusive supervision, leader-member exchange, and interpersonal deviance. Following established scale development processes, the DDW scale was inspected for validity and reliability across seven studies involving over 2,500 participants in the United States and China. The results support the reliability and validity of a six-item DDW scale, offering a practical and behavior-based perspective on respecting dignity in the workplace.
