Abstract |
Doing harm in order to do good is an inevitable, if unfortunate, feature of organizational and professional life. It is also one of the most psychologically challenging acts a person can be asked to perform. Yet this is precisely what many people are called upon to do at work in order to advance important societal, organizational, and personal objectives. Necessary evils—tasks in which a person must knowingly and intentionally cause emotional, material, or physical harm to another human being in the service of achieving some perceived greater good or purpose (Molinsky & Margolis, 2005)—abound across professional contexts. Managers lay people off to improve organizational performance; doctors perform painful medical procedures to diagnose and cure illnesses; addiction counselors deliver “tough love” to substance abuse clients to reduce drug dependency; and police officers evict people from their homes to uphold legal principle and landlord rights. Using qualitative data from 111 managers, doctors, police officers, and addiction counselors, we (1) document how performers both engage and disengage when doing these tasks, (2) unearth multiple forms of interpersonal justice, and (3) identify four styles of response people adopt for handling necessary evils. In the talk, I will contrast this research with larger trends in the study of managerial ethics and sketch an emergent theory of why people navigate these ethically challenging tasks as they do.
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