55. Moral Courage in Organizations

What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?, Vincent van Gogh queried. The answer is: nothing; life requires courage—if not, how else can we confront and meet the myriad environmental, economic, social, political, and technological challenges the reality of existence throws at us every day?

Courage¹ is the ability to confront danger, fear, intimidation, pain, or uncertainty. Physical courage is fortitude in the face of death (and its threat), hardship, or physical pain. Moral courage, the form the attribute nowadays refers to, is put simply the ability to act rightly in the face of discouragement or opposition, possibly and knowingly running the risk of adverse personal consequences. Springing from ethics ²—notably integrity, responsibility, compassion, and forgiveness—it is the quality of mind or spirit that enables a person to withstand danger, difficulty, or fear, persevere, and venture. Comprehensively—as said by Rate et al. (2007), it is a willful, intentional act, executed after mindful deliberation, involving objective substantial risk to the bearer, and primarily motivated to bring about a noble good or worthy end despite, perhaps, the presence of the emotion of fear.³

Of course, for more than we dare imagine, the solution is unconsciousness; courage is not necessary if one is cocooned, deluded, or enslaved to surroundings.⁴ So, what might be the spark of moral courage? Bold enough to differ with Aristotle, Carter (1997) holds that integrity, meaning, steadfast adherence to a strict moral code, comes before anything else. He defines it, operationally, as consisting of three traits: (i) discerning what is right or wrong; (ii) acting on what one has discerned, even at a personal cost; and (iii) saying openly that one is acting on one’s understanding of right and wrong.⁵ (After reading him, and considering our imperfections, those of us who thought we were living a life of integrity should not lose heart.)⁶

So, what of it? Well, since the age-old practice of organizing⁷ calls for organization(s) and organizations have—notwithstanding (as the case may be) the accomplishment of the joint purpose for which they are established—copiously documented shortcomings,⁸ both their members and targets obviously stand to gain, ceteris paribus, from moral strength and associated ethical and pro-social behavior⁹ as both the means and the end of moral agency. Fast-growing interest in corporate governance and corporate reputation bear that out.

At its most basic, moral courage helps cultivate mindful organizational environments that, among others, offset groupthink; mitigate hypocrisy and “nod-and-wink” cultures; educate mechanical conformity and compliance; bridge organizational silos; and check irregularities, misconduct, injustice, and corruption. (Learning organizations put a premium on critical thinking and effective questioning, embrace failure, and generally conduce moral and corporate values ¹⁰ to achieve enduring success holding social good.) More profoundly, moral courage consolidates the trust, enshrined in formal contracts, oral contracts, and psychological contracts that organizations depend on.

However, all other things will not be held constant: globalization and the opportunity and competition it stimulates are already heightening tensions.¹¹ Concurrently, some deficiencies of the free market and the economic models it underpins are more and more manifest, as the global financial crisis of 2007–2008 continues to demonstrate.

There is growing evidence also that organizations, institutions too for that matter,¹² find it hard to respond effectively to the rapidly changing, uncertain environment. (The organizations the world needs in a chaos of change are not those of yesterday, when a tall hierarchy was the organizational model of choice: they are fluid and networked to compete on the edge with distributed leadership, anticipation, and reactivity.)¹³ In their understandable bewilderment, they are becoming ever more morally complex environments that impose significant ethical demands and challenges on actors within and outside them.¹⁴ They must renounce ethical mediocrity and transit through minimum ethics to display honesty and authenticity in everyday life, for example, vis-à-vis defensive routines—aka undiscussables—in the workplace.¹⁵ Needless to say, most are not there yet. So, where are they?

An almost universal feature of organizations, both in the private and public sectors, is bureaucracy.¹⁶ The purpose of a bureaucracy is to execute the actions of an organization toward its purpose and mission with the greatest possible efficiency and at the least cost of resources. Defying the edict that organizing is perpetual change, the key characteristics of its “ideal” form remain unchanged since Max Weber outlined them more than a hundred years ago; they are (i) hierarchy, (ii) division of labor, and (iii) departmentalization. Nowadays, however, especially in the public sector, this rational method of organization connotes to many a system of administration marked by officialism, proliferation, and red tape. Worse, the terms “bureaucrat,” “bureaucratic,” and “bureaucracy” are sometimes used as invectives.

In a hard-hitting work, now on its fifth edition, Hummel (2007) takes the position that bureaucracy is malevolent. Fragmentation of knowledge and dilution of individual responsibility are its key features, especially in large organizations including governments, business corporations, professional groups, etc. (In modern society most work is done by organizations.) Paraphrasing at length, this is so because bureaucratic structures force people into behaviors that alter the psyche’s processes by which knowledge is acquired and emotions are felt. As a result, individuals no longer retain the right to judge what is right or wrong and are no longer accorded the ability to judge when work is done well or poorly. Above all, bureaucracy determines who or what people are. The individual disappears: his or her personality evanesces to be replaced by a bundle of functions—a role. Ralph Hummel sees that bureaucracy runs roughshod over belief , deliberation, emotion, experience, faith, feeling, judgment, meaning, purpose, and resistance. “Yet, human beings have great difficulty working without a sense of what they are doing (reality), without a sense that what they do affects others for good or for ill (morality), without an inner sense of who they are (personality), and without feelings for the things they belabor or the people they work with or the work itself (intentionality). Imprisoned in reality structures that can enforce such working conditions from without, people in bureaucracy make up their own reality from within. Fantasy comes to dominate.” In sum, and all for the sake of efficiency, bureaucrats are asked to become people without conscience, to abandon any sense of mastery, and to leave their emotions at home.

In like fashion, David Luban, Strudler, and Wasserman (1992) charge that the collectivization of the workplace has wrought a transformation in traditional moral values, replacing individual responsibility and internal norms with group identification and external norms. Bureaucracy makes four knowledge conditions difficult to satisfy, whereby a decision-maker (i) recognizes that he or she has come to a fork in the road; (ii) knows that he or she must make the choice in a fairly short, distinct period; (iii) confronts a small number of well-defined options; and (iv) possesses the information needed to make the decision. Given this predicament, they put forward five obligations arising from the risk that an individual will do or contribute to harm without knowing it. They are obligations of (i) investigation, (ii) communication, (iii) protection, (iv) prevention, and (v) precaution.¹⁷

Morgan (1986) suggests we should use metaphors to understand and change organizations, with implications for moral courage as we shall see. Specifically, the new ways of thinking metaphors instill facilitate perception from distinct viewpoints to generate both competing and complementary insights and suggest actions that may not have been possible before; they can help improve the design and management of organizations, for instance, to analyze and diagnose problems.

He makes out eight types of organizations in the public and private sectors: (i) organizations as machines, (ii) organizations as organisms, (iii) organizations as brains, (iv) organizations as cultures, (v) organizations as political systems, (vi) organizations as psychic prisons, (vii) organization as flux and transformation, and (viii) organizations as instruments of domination. (The machine, organism, culture, and psychic prison metaphors resonate most with people. Of course, combinations of the eight types are possible.) Fans claim that the eight perspectives can help us control our destinies and avoid our allotted fate. Humbly, Gareth Morgan advises that, however useful, images must still be used guardedly: by their very nature, they create partial insights that can mislead if relied upon too heavily. Granted that all eight types refer to organizations, the repercussions of which on individual (and collective) responsibility were discussed earlier, an investigation of what light each metaphor throws on the enabling environment for moral courage would seem warranted. In public sector bureaucracies, from among the four readily recognized images, the machine and psychic prison metaphors can explain psychologies of mindless obedience with possible impact on ethical and pro-social behavior. A machine is designed to perform work of a repetitive nature and the machine metaphor promotes the belief that organizations can be engineered. However, even though persons in positions of formal authority may well like to treat their colleagues as though they were cogs in a well-oiled machine, the four primary principles of integrity, responsibility, compassion, and forgiveness require more nuance. Next, to control their impulses and live in harmony with others, individuals go through unconscious psychological mechanisms of denial, displacement, projection, rationalization, regression, and sublimation. Organizations have similar neurotic tendencies leading to debilitating conflict or dysfunctional behavior. But when the collective manifestation of negative psychological states associated with domination press an individual’s consciousness, organizations can become psychic prisons. Much as the image of organizations as machines, the dehumanization and exploitation described by that metaphor does not bode well for moral courage.

People will keep organizing with or without organizations: their survival depends on it. Emergent phenomena, such as civil and nongovernment organizations, and practices, such as outsourcing, are infiltrating or hollowing out once-watertight organizational boundaries. The art and craft of jazz, which distribute leadership, fuel interest in other organizing processes and forms of organization. Notwithstanding, until such new ways of organizing and coordinating develop a critical mass—be that through returning to what worked in the past or pressing into new territory, the bulk of organizing will likely continue to be performed by the routine of bureaucracy, at least in the foreseeable future. And, with that, the need for moral courage will grow unabated.

Where then might we go from here? Sadly, there is no shortcut. To begin, individuals and organizations should grasp that the development of a desire to act with moral courage is influenced by personal factors in the form of automatic and conscious self-regulation. Personal factors, in turn, are swayed by situational and contextual factors, e.g., organizational directives, rewards, and punishments; social norms; and social pressure. Of equal importance is the notion that moral courage is not automatic behavior per se; it is a practice to which one becomes habituated. Ralph Waldo Emerson thought, rightly, that a great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before. Marrying cognitive, technical, and emotional intelligence,¹⁸ only by repeatedly going through a process of analysis, interpretation, debate, and judgment enlightened by ethics can people sharpen their skills in moral reasoning and in this manner develop moral intelligence. Beyond statements of corporate values, human resource departments might also need to recruit for values and help spread the message that reinforcing these starts at the top.