Grappling with ethical tension as an HR leader

Ethical dilemmas are a commonality in the modern-day workplace, especially when you consider the socio, political, and cultural tensions that can so easily arise. So, how do HR leaders manage this?

In a recent HR Leader podcast episode, editor Jerome Doraisamy spoke to Cranlana Centre for Ethical Leadership program director Dr Matt Beard about ethical dilemmas and how easily they can arise in the workplace.

Firstly, Beard explained the main premise for what an ethical dilemma is and how it may play out in the contemporary workplace.

“One way of thinking about it is to say that an ethical dilemma is a kind of intellectual problem. In some ways, there are good arguments and reasons why any of the different options you’re facing in a certain situation might be a good one. So, we might think about, in a personal example, do you tell the truth to someone who’s just gotten a new haircut?

“They’ve taken a big risk for the first time. Personally, you don’t think it’s paid off. You also know their mental health hasn’t been great, their self-esteem isn’t good, and this has been a big step for them. So, an ethical dilemma: do you tell the truth, or do you protect this person’s kind of fragile emotional state?

“There are really good arguments for why you might want to choose either of those two options. You’ve got a dilemma, right? It’s not clear which option to take. Then there are these tests of integrity where it’s actually really clear what the right thing to do is, but it’s just really hard, practically speaking, to make that choice,” said Beard.

According to Beard, these situations, in reality, are not an intellectual problem. Instead, they’re a challenge of integrity.

“It’s not an intellectual problem. It’s a challenge of integrity, and it’s often a challenge of context. It’s not just about the individual; it’s about how we set up the environment. That’s one way of thinking about ethical dilemmas,” said Beard.

“Most often, when someone comes to you and says, ‘I’ve got an ethical dilemma,’ they’re actually talking about both of those things. They’re including that there might be some kind of an intellectual problem, or it might be that they’re in kind of one of these tests of integrity.”

“The main thing is that when people say that they’re confronting an ethical dilemma, most of the time, what they mean is something in the situation has changed their kind of internal sense of right and wrong, and it’s broken their pattern of just going through the day-to-day motion, and they’ve kind of had to stop and go, ‘oh shit, there’s something really significant here.’”

In terms of other examples that can cause these ethical dilemmas in the workplace, it tends to vary depending on the context and environment. Beard explained that there are ingrained issues that often arise in which HR teams have had to deal with for millennia.

“I think that there are some timeless things that human resources professionals have always had to deal with that are inherently ethical in nature because they are dealing with people. And when you are dealing with people, there is always going to be an ethical component to that because there are ethical ways and unethical ways to treat people,” said Beard.

Tension is a product of these ethical dilemmas, which can scare off HR personnel from engaging with these issues. However, despite the complex situation that may occur from addressing it, Beard believes ethical tension should never be ignored.

“Tension is where energy comes from. Tension is where we get clarity about what it is that we’ve actually got to do. But one of the challenges is that tensions also make us uncomfortable,” said Beard.

“Acknowledging this inherent tension in the function of HR within an organisation without, therefore, saying, and therefore everything we do is fundamentally broken and capitalist because ultimately, we’re trying to serve the bottom line. But acknowledging those two different pools is what sharpens the ethical tension.

“We don’t like talking about ethical tension today because increasingly any acknowledgement that something is ethically laden, that something is complex, or that there is risk here can trigger a whole lot of outrage.

“The primary currency with which we deal with ethical issues at the moment is to prosecute them and try to find the hero and the villain in the story. So, it’s much easier to pretend the problem’s not there.”