Minding the moral gap; career development themes and special issues

Citation

Gibb, S. (2003), "Minding the moral gap; career development themes and special issues", Career Development International, Vol. 8 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/cdi.2003.13708caa.001

Minding the moral gap; career development themes and special issues

Minding the moral gap; career development themes and special issues

The article in this issue by Callanan on "What price career success?" raises questions about the place and role of morality in management. Two contemporary studies and interpretations of the general cases, the one against moral identity influencing management behaviour and the other for greater moral analysis, are available. First Schrijvers (2002) represents the view that morality has no place in management. His book How to Be a Rat, which has been a bestseller in Holland, argues, and advises, that to succeed as a manager it is necessary to be at least amoral; and if circumstances justify it, to be what others would define as immoral. It is justifiable to lie, to bribe, to cheat, to cause fear and to intimidate. Becoming a "rat", involves a range of activities that are, in themselves, neither controversial nor offensive. For example, people, including managers, need to identify and be committed to their own interests and aims; they should have goals. They need to accept that political battles will happen in workplaces, and be prepared to engage in them; they need to be realistic. They need to work on their own sources of power; they should be savvy. Finally, they have to play to win; not be a victim.

What is controversial in many regards, is how these general concerns are translated into specific tactics. He prescribes, for example, deliberately feeding people's fears; in order to distract them from properly and rationally evaluating situations and to make them malleable. He advises that humiliating people where necessary to achieve one's goals is appropriate. And he counsels that knowing one's own vanities is important primarily in order to avoid having others manipulate them. The idea is to not to be self enlightened, or even cunning, but to be sneaky and verminous. Schrijvers is consciously and explicitly updating the well known and classic counsels of Machiavelli, originating in an era of medieval principalities; a context which is taken to provide parallels with contemporary business. This is a legitimation of a leadership amorality as the foundation of the modern order, rather than adherence to conventional values of professional ethics.

Professional morality, which denies the realities of how management really works, hinders rather than helps the manager. When managers and professionals use their "at home" language to talk about these realities they talk about learning about and from the villains, about how the opportunistic and power seeking, those with an unabashed will to power, are those who succeed. That, he concludes, is the norm. Schrijvers then seeks to displace the rhetoric of a sanitised view of what is morally "right" with an analysis of the realities of how managers actually succeed. And success goes to rats, because rats make things happen.

Glover (2001) represents the opposite view; that morality matters, and matters more urgently, in all areas of human action and behaviour. This is because a "moral gap" has grown throughout the twentieth century, becoming the Achilles' heel of our otherwise invulnerably ordered and civilised societies. There is a gap between having morals and applying them. People approach some situations and relations morally, but then approach other situations or relations amorally. Glover argues that this gap has been increasing; it is not the case that people are becoming less moral, for they still seek to maintain a moral identity, but in practice they enact it less often.

Glover does not deal with management directly; his is a historical analysis of people at war, perpetrating torture and genocide. In these situations it is the existence of a moral gap more often than a complete absence of morality which allows the worst to happen. The problems of the "moral gap" he argues, has increased in all cultures throughout the twentieth century, and it now permeates all aspects of society. Management in organisations is as prone to the problems of the moral gap as other areas of life. Effective management is likely to go awry when natural human responses and moral identity are compromised or absent. For Glover natural human responses include respecting others' dignity or status, and feeling sympathy and caring about others' misery or happiness. For Glover having a moral identity entails commitments to being a certain kind of person, to having integrity. Such a moral identity and moral responses are active for those in a community, but not to those outside; for them there will be indifference or hostility.

In the development of careers is the moral gap being closed or further expanded? How do issues which affect moral identity and moral resources arise in the course of careers? If such a moral gap cannot be eradicated can it be better contained? Is anyone inspired to work on a special issue of CDI investigating these issues? if so, please get in touch.

Stephen Gibb

ReferencesGlover, J. (2001), Humanity; A Moral History of the Twentieth Century, Pimlico, London.Schrijvers, J. (2002), Hoe word ik een rat?, (How to Be a Rat?), Scriptum, Uitgever.