Ethical scandals across organizations are omnipresent in both recent and distant history (e.g., WellsFargo, Volkswagen, Theranos). Yet, our understanding of why they happen, or how they could be prevented, remains scant. We argue that empowering leadership behaviour is a potentially powerful tool for managers to promote employee moral courage and, ultimately, whistleblowing in organizations. However, organizational workplace climates can have strong, coercive effects on employees, potentially thwarting empowering leadership’s positive impact on employee moral courage. Integrating this notion, we argue that employee perceptions of organizational workplace climates qualify the empowering leadership-employee moral courage relationship. Specifically, we propose that higher (vs. lower) levels of unethical pro-organizational climate suppress the positive effect of empowering leadership on employee moral courage. In summary, we argue for an indirect effect of empowering leadership on employee whistleblowing through moral courage that is bounded by an unethical pro-organizational climate. Preliminary findings across two samples support our predictions, showing that the positive relationship between empowering leadership and moral courage is entirely neutralized when the unethical pro-organizational climate is higher (vs. lower). We contribute to the empowering leadership, leadership development, and business ethics literature by providing clarity on factors that drive, or thwart, employee ethical behaviour such as whistleblowing.