Abstract
There is significant debate in business ethics regarding the place of loyalty and gratitude in business relations. While most accounts of loyalty—both of employers to employees and of employees to employers—suppose that duties of loyalty are ultimately grounded in contractual agreements, our view is that these relationships are also personal and develop elements of friendship that involve emotional bonds. Although relationships of employment begin as contractual and maintain that character as long as the contract endures, such relations are interpersonal as well as contractual, and for this dimension of the relationship, the ethics of care can give important guidance in understanding the moral nature of the relationship and obligations that flow from it. Our aim in this chapter is to argue that the approach that care theorists take toward personal relationships—which involves emphasizing the importance of personal relationships, sustaining connections with others, and using highly contextual reasoning to make moral decisions—also applies to the personal relationships developed between employers and employees. On this view, it is virtuous to replicate relationships of care, empathy, and concern for others in the workplace, especially when employers and employees maintain more intimate and personal relationships.
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Notes
- 1.
It is hard to see how defining the necessary and sufficient conditions of loyalty could cover these various loyalties without emptying the concept of any force since not all expressions of loyalty are “good” or moral. For example, a loyal employee might fail to become a whistle-blower when confronted with damning evidence of corporate wrongdoing, or a loyal Nike or Gap customer might willfully refuse to acknowledge allegations of use of sweatshop labor out of loyalty to the brand.
- 2.
Carol Gilligan’s early research suggests that men and women discuss morality using two different “voices:” the voice of justice and the voice of care. For Gilligan, loyalty would be an expression of care to particular individuals in concrete relationships. (See Carol Gilligan 1982.)
- 3.
See especially Virginia Held, who argues that the concepts, metaphors, and images associated with the care involved in parenting/mothering best express the dynamics of the moral life. (Held 2006) Nel Noddings also argues that we each exist in a web of relationships, and that in these relationships of care, one should be both a care-er and a cared-for. We should seek to preserve and nurture the concrete and valuable relationships we have with specific persons. (See especially Chapters 2 and 3 of Noddings 1984.)
- 4.
The obligations that flow from our caring relationships are described differently by care ethicists. For example, according to Gilligan, we should exercise special care for those we are concretely in relation to by attending to their particular needs, values, and desires. Eva Feder Kittay, on the other hand, argues that we have an obligation to exercise special care toward those particular persons with whom we have valuable close relationships, particularly where the relationship is one of “dependency” such as that of a child on a parent (Kittay 1998).
- 5.
Keller argues that the only time loyalty is a duty is between children and their parents. Children should perform loyal actions, out of loyal feelings and motives. Keller (2007), 143.
- 6.
In addition, Keller is right to say that not all forms of loyalty involve prioritizing another’s interests, and that this is neither sufficient nor necessary for loyalty to that entity. One may prioritize someone’s interest out of duty or obligation and not as an expression of loyalty, and conversely, loyalty can be expressed without prioritizing another’s interests.
- 7.
In the preceding, we have used “employer” to refer ambiguously to the business in its role relative to the employee, in which the “employer” may be conceived of by the employee as being both the abstract legal entity of the corporation and the representatives of that abstract legal entity. Since we will now be discussing particular interpersonal relationships within business, we will avoid the ambiguous term “employer” in favor of speaking either of “corporation” or “management”. By “corporation” we will mean exclusively the abstract legal entity and by “management” we will mean exclusively the group of actual people who represent the corporation in their roles as managers, supervisors, and executives.
- 8.
As stated in the Restatement (Third) of Agency, “Agency is the fiduciary relationship that arises when one person (a “principal”) manifests assent to another person (an “agent”) that the agent shall act on the principal’s behalf and subject to the principal’s control, and the agent manifests assent or otherwise consents so to act” (American Law Institute 2006). Having entered a relationship of special trust, in which the agent is taken as representative of the principal, there are special obligations to promote the ends of the principal.
- 9.
- 10.
For example, in a small, privately-owned, family-run business, there may be little sense in speaking of loyalty to the business separately from loyalty to the owner-manager, while in most U.S. businesses, loyalty to the corporation may be quite separable, and may indeed come into conflict with, loyalty to one’s co-workers or managers.
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Oxley, J., Wittkower, D. (2011). Care and Loyalty in the Workplace. In: Hamington, M., Sander-Staudt, M. (eds) Applying Care Ethics to Business. Issues in Business Ethics, vol 34. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9307-3_12
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