This article provided by Sands Anderson, Virginia horse lawyers and North Carolina attorneys.
What happens when loyalty to an employer conflicts with the desire to do the right thing? How do you balance loyalty and telling the truth? Employees and employers experience this conflict all the time, but the organization now in the cross-hairs is the White House. While the stakes here are much higher than most workplace issues, the decision-making process reveals lessons for all of us.
Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan’s What Happened? raises these issues starkly. Writing the book necessarily involved McClellan in making a choice between loyalty and higher ethical values. Such choices are always difficult. It’s impossible to believe that McClellan was motivated by money. Whatever he’ll make on his book, it can’t equal the long-term prestigious job prospects, lucrative compensation and security, he would have as a loyal former member of a Republican White House team if he had remained silent. Most people don’t have that luxury.
Employees owe a duty of loyalty to their employers. In many cases, it’s a legal obligation the courts enforce. But it’s also an ethical duty.
The initial response of Bush insiders is a common one in such circumstances: they charge McClellan with disloyalty. Comments like “this isn’t the Scott we knew” implicitly say “this isn’t the loyal member of the team we thought he was.” The subtext is that disloyalty is such a serious ethical breach that the merits should be ignored. This can’t be right.
Keeping Quiet About Wrongdoing
When wrongdoing is ongoing in any organization, people usually find out about it sooner or later. From sexual harassment to racial stereotyping to revenue manipulation, wrongdoings may encompass misfeasance at the highest level or lower down in the totem pole. Should people - can people - legitimately reveal such wrongdoing? People who place loyalty in an unchallenged position at the top of the scale of ethical values would say “No.”
Yet the idea that the loyalty to one’s employer trumps all other ethical obligations is startling and dangerous. It’s also distasteful. We have duties to our employers not to disclose trade secrets, not to compete with them on the side, and to avoid doing things that will lead to legal or reputation problems.
Although we can expect a developing spin from the White House on McClellan’s revelations, it’s interesting that the initial response has not been to say that McClellan was wrong - either about the selling of the Iraq war or the CIA leak case. The “disloyalty” allegation shifts the focus from the truth to the propriety of McClellan having said anything at all. Indeed, many view the fact that the White House has not taken on McClellan on the merits as a tacit admission that his allegations are true.
Important though it is, we as a society don’t accept that loyalty is pre-eminent. In 2002, Time Magazine named Cynthia Cooper of WorldCom, Coleen Rowley of the FBI and Sherron Watkins of Enron as Persons of the year for their whistle-blowing activities, Cooper and Rowley for their role in disclosing two of the major corporate scandals of the first years of this decade, and Rowley for charging that the FBI had failed to follow leads on one of the chief plotters of the 9/11 conspiracy against the United States. For these women, and for those of us who did and do applaud them, integrity is a value more deserving the pre-eminence than loyalty.
Where an employee speaks out against wrongdoing, employers don’t play the loyalty card because what the employee has said is incorrect or untruthful. They invoke loyalty because the allegations are truthful. Loyalty is important and we rightly pay great deference to it. But when it becomes the smokescreen to hide wrongdoing, we shouldn’t pay any deference to it at all. People with robust commitments to integrity won’t be content to work for companies that send the message “loyalty to the company,” must trump that commitment to honesty.
Organizations that want ethics to flourish will resist the temptation of playing the loyalty card to prevent disclosures of wrongdoing. Rather than worrying about what song the whistle-blower sings, they should make sure that there’s no tune to play.
STEPHEN M. GOLDMAN is author of Temptations in the Office: Ethical Choices and Legal Obligation (Praeger - 2008). An attorney at Sands Anderson in McLean, VA, he also teaches corporate law at Catholic University of America.