The Ethics of Team Spirit

Some time ago I asked you to consider the case of Comcast urging its employees to help it avoid being voted the “Worst Company in America” on the Consumerist site. At the time, I noted that it had been an ill-considered move on the company’s part, as it was inevitable both that word would leak out about the request and that the resulting firestorm of Internet mockery would make the company look bad if it didn’t already. But even if we feel that this specific action was foolish, it does raise the larger question of how much support a company can reasonably expect from its personnel when they are off the clock and going about their own business – which is not a trivial issue, nor is it a foolish question…

Let’s begin by establishing that no employer should ever assume that their employees are completely devoted to the firm’s cause; it’s a truism among line managers that the company does not own its employees – it only rents them. Thus, however much we might wish that our employees are spreading the good word about our organization when they’re away from work, this is not actually part of their duties to us, and we can’t expect them to do so. In the management literature, people who go beyond the scope of their job descriptions to help the company are said to be exhibiting “extra-role behaviors” or ERBs, which are generally described as including speaking well of or promoting the company while away from the workplace. While it would be nice to imagine that well-paid, well-treated employees would just naturally want to say nice things about our company, the truth is that we can’t expect such behavior, we can only ask for it. And this is going to cause problems if the employees feel that they aren’t well-paid or well-treated in fact – or in this case, that their employers really are one of the worse companies in America…

What makes this a question in ethics is twofold. First, asking your people to devote unpaid time and their own personal good name to support your company is bad for morale. The fact is, anyone who had strongly positive feelings about the company would probably vote in favor of it (and against the competition) whether you asked them to or not. Second, there’s a definite aspect of trying to influence a set of data with this action. The Worst Company in America poll isn’t a scientific study, and it’s highly debatable whether its outcome will actually influence any operational decisions in any of the affected companies, but to whatever extent this activity was really based on public opinion it will now be compromised by the organized cheerleading on the part of Comcast. If the company had actually demanded that its employees support it in this fashion that would be a third (and potentially much more serious) dimension, but there is nothing in the original story to suggest that they did. The real issue here is whether the company had the right to ask for this kind of support from its personnel in the first place…

Should the company be able to ask for support from its employees in a public forum? Or is it placing unreasonable pressure on its personnel by doing so? Does it matter if the company has made good-faith efforts to treat its people well and resolve the issues that got it nominated for this dubious “honor” in the first place? How about if the employees are participants in a stock purchase plan (in which case they are part of the ownership of the company, and WILL directly benefit by supporting it)? What if management limited their actions to telling the workers about the contest/survey and asking them to support the company’s position if they felt they reasonably could – in effect, asking them to vote their conscience? For that matter, does management have a responsibility to their stockholders (employees or otherwise) defuse the situation by drumming up support for their organization by whatever legal means they have available? That is, by taking no action, would management actually be failing in their fiduciary responsibility to the owners of the company?

It’s worth thinking about…