ORGANIZATIONAL MORALITY AND RESPONSIBILITY
In the previous chapter I have concentrated
upon ways in which the administrator can by one vice or another contribute to
organizational value pathology, and I have dwelt, in particular, upon the
so-called philosophy of success. Why, in an age of supposed scientific
enlightenment, of so much social welfare, progress, and concern, would an
administrator consciously, as an act of individual morality, secretly subscribe
to such philosophy? For several possible reasons and in several ways. First, he
may come to believe from his private experience and personal phenomenology that
this philosophy best reflects the truth about the world, a truth to be sure
which most men would rather not face because of their tender mindedness, or
lack of courage and nerve in the face of an inimical reality. And so he adopts
it as a reflective and reasoned response: to be evil in an evil world, to beat
the world at its own game, and so on. Or he might suppose that, true or not, a
differential advantage could be gained by its adoption. Most men are too
socially conditioned to subscribe to such a philosophy; the comfortable
half-truths of liberalism and the sentiments of the human relations and human
resources views of man are more to their taste; and so they are likely dupes
and proper victims for the ruthless spirit. This would be the wolf in the sheep
pen theory. Again, he may not totally accept the secret doctrine but
acknowledge it as being partially and significantly true and therefore worthy
of conditional acceptance. Pragmatically, then, he will embrace the philosophy
from time to time as and where he judges it appropriate. This would be ad hoc
commitment. Or he may succumb, as many have done, to the lure of the Grand
Temptation; that the end, if it be righteous, justifies the means. So the
philosophy can be used to achieve power so that, once achieved and secure, just
rule and righteous administration can follow. Dostoevsky has enshrined this
version of machination in his famous Grand Inquisitor dialogue:
In
such ways, whatever the revulsion or offence to ordinary sensibilities that the
doctrines of power and their associated value orientations may convey, it must
be accepted that the administrative careerist can make this type of
philosophical commitment. That he does so, however, is a matter of individual
choice, individual morality, or, in our language, the translation of the values
of power and success to the Type I range of valuation. It is, of course,
subject to critique from other philosophical positions but all that the proponents
of these contending positions can do is to seek to persuade their audience by
reason and rhetoric and all the powers at their disposal, that they have the
better values. In the end the act of choice is individual; and if free and
conscious, then moral.
We
must now consider morality from the standpoint of the organization, the
collective, and ask whether organizations in and of themselves are in any way
morally responsible or could in any way constitute a deterrent or impediment to
moral action.
ORGANIZATIONS MALEVOLENCE
In the matter of organizational morality
the case for the prosecution has been put most cogently by Ladd (1970). He
argues that formal organizations and bureaucracy are in certain critical
aspects antagonistic to ordinary morality, that is, to Type II conventions and
the Type I ethics summed up in the Kantian imperatives. This antagonism comes
about because of the organizational value of rationality and the nomothetic
principle of depersonalization. In the complex bureaucracy, individuals are not
whole persons but role incumbents, partial sets of skills which are of utility
to the organizational whole. They are parts, replaceable and substitutable
parts at that. In the organization, rationally construed, no one is
indispensable. Morality, in glaring contrast, is a function of total
personality and this latter exceeds and overflows any role.
In
any event, it does not matter what such ‘personalities’ feel or think, for the
organizational language game determines the values appropriate for the social
or collective decisions which are made in its name. Organizational goals
combined with rational procedures for their attainment (glossed and glazed
where necessary by the refinements of the human relations movement) make
organizational life analogous to chess. Within the game there are no ‘right’ or
‘wrong’ moves, only those of more or less efficacy given the set system of
rules which cannot in itself be challenged. The ordinary member becomes a
logical factotum, alienated or manipulated. Even that extraordinary member, the
administrator, is not an author of acts but an agent, one who does things in
the name of others.
There
is a special way in which the administrator can be irresponsible. This would be
by philosophical and psychological detachment-by the belief that the
organization is bigger than any individual and possess a destiny and logic of
its own. He then commits the biological fallacy and worse; the organization is
not only reified, but deified. And the agent is not personally or morally
responsible for the acts which are under the authority or authorship of the
collectivity. Bureaucrats and civil servants, administrators of industry and
education, no less than Adolf Eichmann, must ‘faithfully execute policies of
which they personally disapprove’ (Merton et al., 195, 132). And outwardly
benevolent organizations can become latent collective forces for evil.
AGENCY AND RESPONSIBILITY
We are not
concerned here with the legal aspects of agency, but rather with the socio-psychological
ramifications of collective or social decision making where the administrator’s
decision is imputed to the organization. In the case of contracts, for example,
the official concluding the agreement is neither personally bound nor
personally responsible for the consequences of what becomes an organizational
act. And we may all have felt a certain frisson of irresponsibility when the
will of the group, or the leaders of the group, is allowed to sway and prevail
over valid opposition.
The
agent is conceived to act in the interest of his principal. Since organizations
are ostensibly rational interest-pursuing collectivities, it follows that their
cats may conflict with the interest of the next and higher orders of
collectivity within their sphere of operation. The agent may thus find himself
from time to time engaged in doing things of which he would not personally
approve under the more liberal conditions of individual responsibility; in an
extrapolation, as it were, from the lawyer who knows he is seeking the
exculpation of a guilty client. Or the group ordained by the organization’s
structure may have arrived at a decision to which the administrator is opposed
on idiographic value grounds, but which he feels on nomothetic value grounds
must be advanced and executed. The organizational decision is made, according
to Barnard, ‘non-personally from the point of view of its organizational effect
and its relation to the organization purpose’ (203). Simon’s corresponding
positivistic text is ‘decisions in private management must take as their
ethical premises the objectives that have been set for the organization’
(1965,29). But this appearance of ethical neutrality can serve as a cover for
Type III malice, spite, and animus, within and outside the organization, at the
same time that positive morality of the Type I order can be made to seem
irrelevant. And the appearance of rationality can serve to excuse most, if not
all, of the well-documented record of personally felt injustices at the hands
of bureaucracy. Not every anti-bureaucratic sentiment can be explained away
under Thompson’s term, bureauticism. Organizational dehumanism or inhumanism
extends even to those organizations which by definition are Type I
collectivities: the Roman Catholic Church with its religious purpose, the
Communist State with its ideological purpose. ‘Apparat’ stifles. Administration
devalues value. All in the cold light of reason and the cool detachment of
agency.
Ladd
pursues this line of reasoning to the point where he concludes that social
decisions cannot be moral:
Thus, for logical reasons
it is improper to expect organizational conduct to conform to the ordinary
principles of morality. We cannot and must not expect formal organizations, or
their representatives acting in their official capacities, to be honest,
courageous, considerate, sympathetic, or to have any kind of moral integrity.
Such concepts are not in the vocabulary, so to speak, of the organizational
language-game. (We do not find them in the vocabulary of chess either!) Actions
that are wrong by ordinary moral standards are not so for organizations;
indeed, they may often be required. Secrecy, espionage and deception do not
make organizational action wrong; rather they are right, proper and, indeed,
rational, if they serve to objectives of the organization. They are no more or
no less wrong than, say, bluffing is in poker. From the point of view of
organizational decision-making they are “ethically neutral.” (1970, 499-500)
This is a
restatement from the perspective of moral philosophy of the constantly
recurring dilemma in administrative studies which, following Getzels and Cuba,
we have referred to above as the nomothetic-idiographic dialectic. It is
paradoxical that though morality governs relations with others it is itself an
individual matter.
In the analysis
of value we have identified this dilemma as a contest between discipline and
indulgence and, throughout, I have implied that the administrator should
identify himself with the collective interest. This ethical implication now
needs to be emended, sophisticated. It holds good only with qualifications.
Here, for example, it is being suggested that organizations are not necessarily
benevolent nor forces for social good buy may be corrupters of their members
and their agents, that ‘actions that are wrong by ordinary moral standards are
not so far organizations’.
The
administrator’s proclivity for the nomothetic must be morally grounded and have
sophisticated justifiability. I do not contest Ladd’s analysis of the moral
problem; per contra I would lend some strength to his vision of organizations
as morally stultifying and ethically dangerous entities, but I would take issue
with any underestimation of the administrator as an agent incapable of altering
the moral climate and moral destiny of his organization. His power to do this
may not be what he (or I) would wish, but what he does have is his golden
potentially. If he denies that potential by adopting the persona of the agent,
he offends as Pontius Pilate then and the positivistic bureaucrat now. He
becomes his organizations’s faceless creature instead of its creator, a
functionary in the lowest sense of the word. Yet, to fuse individual morality
with social decision is difficult; it demands much, as Barnard constantly
stressed, in the way of moral complexity. In comprehending this complexity it
is necessary to cope with two difficult concepts: self-interest and
responsibility. The first is only simple on the surface. The administrator has
to get clear about his own deepest interests and where they ramify and lie. To
do this calls for much insight, some intuition, and if not, Guardian-style, the
vision of the form of the Good, then at least something of the Pauline vision through
a glass darkly, of one’s own true self.
The second
concept, responsibility, is vexed and tortuous and must be unravelled. We have
already raised the question, When all are responsible who is responsible? Let
us try now to elucidate the notion of responsibility.
It is first
necessary to distinguish between legal, formal, and moral responsibility. The
concept is also vacuous without the connective linguistic particles, ‘to’ and
‘for’. Responsibility is always to somebody for something. The subtlety is that
the somebody may be oneself and the something may be an internal
phenomenological event.
We shall not be
concerned with the causative sense of the term, e.g. when I accidently trip and
in falling break the china vase. I am here the efficient material cause of a
series of entailed consequences which are unhappy in their outcome. The owner
may hold me ‘responsible’ for the damaged crockery, but the sense is trivial,
and we shall interpret moral responsibility as requiring the condition of some
element of voluntarism or free will.
To return to
legal responsibility: in this sense both bodies human and bodies corporate are
held accountable for their acts to a system of game rules as established by law
or legal system; local, national, or international. My accidental breakage of
your vase may, of course, oblige me to recompense you with damages, depending
upon the circumstances and the legal game within which we are players. The only
moral element here is any sense of obligation I may happen or choose to have. The
law game rules will usually, however, trace their origin to and seek their
foundation in Type II consensus values and Type I principles.
The difficulty
in the present context of argument has to do with bodies corporate. That one
cannot hang a common seal has already been stated. And it is clear that
corporate acts cannot always be reduced to the acts of individuals. If I own
ten shares in General Motors I am not responsible if it violates the anti-trust
rules, or does those things which are not good for the nation. And if it goes
bankrupt I am not financially responsible beyond the rules of legal limited
liability, even if the greatest individual economic hadrships are a consequence.
On the other hand, accountability of a sort can be impressed upon the individual
actors who are agents of a corporate body through such legal devices as fines,
imprisonment, and loss of license. Lay has the sanctions of naked power. The
force of legal responsibility is real enough, especially since the corporate
agents are usually administrators, but it is distinctive from moral
responsibility.
Formal
responsibility can be considered as a subset of legal responsibility. It refers
to the accountabilities sanctioned by the game rules of an organization. Acts
are constrained by a potent system of rewards and punishments, including
salaries, promotion, demotion and termination. The monitoring functions of
administration and management are a part of this responsibility system. And,
just as law seeks a ground in societal values, so the system of formal
responsibility seeks its ground in the organizational values and policy. Again,
the organizational parallel to corporate bodies would be found in those group
acts (group decisions) stemming from group processes and structures
(committees, boards, and ad hoc groups) established formally within the organization.
So if a committee of peers decides by secret vote, or unrecorded consensus,
that a colleague should be dismissed, against whom can the the injured party
point his finger? The popularity of committee action is understandable. It can
be a way of responsibly avoiding responsibility. But the responsibility then
avoided would be moral responsibility.
This last, moral
responsibility, can reduce to the individual only. It is uniquely
phenomenological. It is the responsibility of a person to himself for his adherence
to his entire range of values but especially to those Type I values with which
he has become authentically engaged. It is the ultimate sense of
responsibility.
MORALITY, MORAL,
COMPLEXITY, AND LEADERSHIP
The notion of morality
described above is self-referent and psychologically complex. It suggest the
presence of internal factors such as
conscience and will, and internal dialectical tensions between principles and
preferences.
This self-centredness should not be allowed to obscure the fact that the content of
moral discourse is outside the individual, and conventionally treats of
relationship with others. The disciplines of ethics and moral philosophy are
relevant to our understanding of responsibility in so far as they can clarify
concepts, set out the arguments, and make the case for Type I and II value.
Their function is also to persuade and conducer to moral behaviour. They are,
as it were, ancillary to moral action. They are not prerequisites of responsibility, but
rather aids to moral navigation.
In the administrator’s purlieu of the
organization the moral actor finds his value difficulties magnified in a
special way, for he is not, so to speak, entirely himself. Technically and
officially he is a role incumbent. If we construe this fact as a reduction of
personal responsibility it opens the way for the criticisms of agency and
bureaucracy given above. But the administrator for one is not a faceless agent,
a depersonalized role incumbent. At least four conditions amplify and com pound
the moral complexity of his task: (1) he designs and creates roles, for himself
as well as for others; (2) he has the overall charge of reconciling the
nomothetic and idiographic aspects of his organization; (3) he determines, in
part or in while, the organizational values, and ; (4) he must do all this within the constraints
imposed by the metavalues (Chapter 11). Consider, too, that his role embraces
such activities as settling value disputes among the organization members,
determining the organizational language game, negotiating with levels of
interest outside the organization; he is sometimes a leader, sometimes a
statesman, sometimes a philosopher, sometimes a judge.
In the face of this, Barnard
recognized and stressed the need for moral skills. His definition of morals is
personal forces or propensities of a general and subtle character in individuals
which tend to inhibit, control, or modify inconsistent immediate specific
desires, impulses, or interest, and to intensify those which are consistent
with such propensities. When such morals were ‘strong and stable’ there would
exist a ‘condition of responsibility’ (261). The translation of values into
action, however, rather than their existence in the abstract, is his primary
concern, and he illustrates:
I know men whose morals as a whole I cannot help believe to
be lower ethically than my own. But these men command my attention and
sometimes my admiration because they adhere to their codes rigidly in the face
of great difficulties; whereas I observe that many others who have a ‘higher’
morality do not adhere to their codes when it would apparently not be difficult
to do so. Men of the first class have a higher sense of responsibility than
those having, as I view them, the higher ethical standards. The point is that responsibility is the
property of an individual by which whatever morality exists in him becomes
effective in conduct. (266-7, Barnard’s italics)
I would not wish to contest this, but would
draw attention to the operative phrase ‘whatever
morality exists within him’. The
demands of administrative life can be responded to in different ways and the
response will be a function of the moral substance of the actor. The
administrator is also in a special position because he has more scope than the
ordinary member for the creation and acceptance of his own role. This, too,
will depend upon his moral complexity and sense of responsibility, upon the
‘morality that exists within him’. To some extent the moral sights can be
raised or lowered, but even if the value structure within is set, the moral act
of consistency with that structure is in the last analysis private and
personal.
I now wish to make a general
hypothesis - one which would be
difficult, though not impossible to test . It is that the quality of leadership
is functionally related to the moral climate of the organization and this, in
turn, to the moral complexity and skills of the leader> Leadership as
presently understood is commonly regarded as having three main dimensions: consideration,
production emphasis, and situational factors (see Chapter 5 above). I would
postulate a fourth dimension, the ‘morality that exists within the leader’.
This, I suggest, can become subtly externalized, contributing to the
administrative phenomena of legitimacy, credibility, and even charisma (where
Type I attachments are notably evident). It can on occasion infuse
organizational life with a quality of meaning going beyond the nomothetic to
the most human and the transrational; it can be, in plain language, inspiring.
Yet this aspect of leadership goes unresearched and unexplored at the level of
social science.
If the hypothesis were to be
confirmed, then there would be an incentive to moral behaviour and an
organizational reward for the practice of responsibility. Honour might yet
prove to be worth a re-evaluation.
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