Do employees leave their moral convictions at the door when they arrive at work? And what happens when workers are asked to perform tasks that clash with their moral commitments? In his dissertation, The Moral Demands of Sustainable Value Creation, Michael Eigner explores why organisations should act as moral agents, and how work can create moral tensions for employees. He argues that not only do workplaces have an ethical responsibility to take employees’ moral convictions seriously, but that doing so would support an organisation’s long-term sustainability.
Moral unease at work
Michael’s research began with a question: can a collective like an organisation, firm, or workplace be a “moral agent” in and of itself? Individuals are typically considered moral agents – that is, having the capacity to discern right from wrong and be held accountable for their actions – but can organisations understand moral reasoning on a collective level, and then act for good or bad purposes accordingly? Michael argues that this is indeed the case. ‘Many organisations already have mechanisms in place for moral decision making, like research ethics committees in universities.’ But what happens when there aren’t more robust structures available to deal with complex moral dilemmas? And what if individuals within an organisation experience a tension between their work life and their private moral convictions?
Michael developed the concept of moral unease to describe the experience of the friction between an employee’s moral commitments and their obligatory activities at work. It may be rare, but there are cases where workplaces ask their staff to contribute to something potentially immoral. Importantly, unlike moral injury, moral unease doesn’t involve profound distress. It’s more like a lingering sense of discomfort that comes from being involved in morally dubious organisational practices. ‘It’s like a scratch to the soul,’ Michael says. ‘However, moral scratches can quickly become wounds if they’re constantly picked at.’
Michael uses the hypothetical example of a father working for a car manufacturer involved in the the Dieselgate scandal. Imagine a man who is just a normal worker doing his job, but he’s kept awake at night thinking about how even his small contribution could be making the world less inhabitable for his young son. It’s not just that the father feels uncomfortable at work. His unease comes from his feeling that he’s morally implicated in the organisation’s wrongdoing. ‘Though the Dieselgate scandal is unique, the uneasiness of individuals in organisations is wide-spread,’ Michael notes. ‘Of course this father could quit his job, but these sorts of exit strategies are very costly to people personally, so they’re trapped.’
‘They key ingredient to the sustainable organisation is having a moral voice. I want people to be morally engaged at work, be able to identify problems of collective agency and express disagreement, to communicate moral information to their organisation – and for the organisation to pick it up.’
Towards moral sustainability in the workplace
Michael contends that organisations could be contributing to their own demise by not securing their moral sustainability. This is the case for workplaces that treat morals as a purely private matter, leaving individuals’ important ethical concerns unaddressed. ‘Take the recent Ed Sheeran scandal,' Michael says. 'If one person doesn’t want to play for Ed Sheeran anymore, that’s easy to accommodate because someone else can always step in, but if everyone jumps ship, it’s clear that there’s a bigger moral dilemma that the organisation hasn’t addressed.’
In situations where a case is important to an employee's individual moral identity and the burden to the organisation is low, Michael argues that firms should allow for moral accommodations. This would not only protect individual moral integrity, but also help organisations create opportunities for organisation change (and perhaps help avoid public scandal).
To ensure long-term sustainability, workplaces shouldn’t see morality as external to organisational life. Michael suggests that firms can create opportunities for members’ opinions on ethical issues to be voiced, recognised, and incorporated into everyday operations. He advocates for both structural mechanisms but also bottom-up approaches. For example, workplaces can create opportunities for employees to raise ethical concerns and establish processes through which these concerns are considered and incorporated into organisational decision making. ‘To have a sustainable system, organisations need to permit individuals to use their voices at work.’
You can read Michael’s dissertation, The Moral Demands of Sustainable Value Creation, here.
