Responsibility at Work

How Leading Professionals Act (or Don't Act) Responsibly

Howard Gardner, Howard Gardner

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781118047507
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Liderazgo

Filled with original essays by Howard Gardner, William Damon, Mihaly Csikszenthmihalyi, and Jeanne Nakamura and based on a large-scale research project, the GoodWork® Project, Responsibility at Work reflects the information gleaned from in-depth interviews with more than 1, 200 people from nine different professions—journalism, genetics, theatre, higher education, philanthropy, law, medicine, business, and pre-collegiate education. The book reveals how motivation, culture, and professional norms can intersect to produce work that is personally, socially, and economically beneficial.At the heart of the study is the revelation that the key to good work is responsilibilty—taking ownership for one's work and its wider impact.

PART ONE

POWERFUL MODELS OF RESPONSIBILITY

1

TAKING ULTIMATE RESPONSIBILITY

William Damon

Kendall Cotton Bronk

It’s not enough that we do our best; sometimes we have to do what’s required

—Sir Winston Churchill

The buck stops here.

—Sign on President Harry Truman’s desk

SOME PEOPLE, WHEN THE CHIPS ARE DOWN, can be counted on to step forward and do whatever they can to salvage a difficult situation. They “take responsibility” for finding a solution, no matter how burdensome, risk-laden, or even hopeless the situation may seem. Others, fearing the personal costs of becoming entangled in a hard problem, find excuses for absenting themselves or looking the other way. They disclaim the problem, perhaps because they believe it was not of their making, or because they have not been given sufficient resources to solve it, or because they have other business that they consider more pressing. Whether explicitly or not, they proclaim “it’s not my problem,” assuming that someone else will step in to fix things.

Stories of people who have assumed difficult responsibilities to a heroic degree are well-known, as are those of people who have famously (or infamously) shirked them. Mother Teresa, for example, felt an intense personal responsibility to care for the ill and impoverished. She once said, “When a poor person dies of hunger, it has not happened because God did not take care of him or her. It has happened because neither you nor I wanted to give that person what he or she needed. Make us worthy, Lord, to serve those people throughout the world who live and die in poverty and hunger. Give them through our hands, this day, their daily bread, and by our understanding and love, give them peace and joy” (Global Catholic Network, n.d.).

Mother Teresa did not leave this consuming job to others, nor did she merely pay lip service to it. Instead she labored for years to help some of the world’s neediest citizens. Even though she knew she could never eradicate hunger or end human suffering entirely, she did as much as she could. “I heard the call to give up all and follow Christ into the slums to serve Him among the poorest of the poor. It was an order” (Global Catholic Network, n.d.). Unlike many of us who are concerned about the world’s poor but fail to do much about it, Mother Teresa took ultimate responsibility for helping them.

On the other end of the responsibility spectrum was Emperor Nero of Rome. In about 64 A.D., a devastating fire swept through Rome, destroying everything in its path. According to the Roman historian Suetonius, the self-indulgent emperor “sang and played the lyre while Rome burned” (Bible History Online, n.d.). No psychologist was present at the time to analyze Nero’s behavior, but we might speculate that he threw himself into a state of denial because he felt inadequate to cope with this formidable challenge. Or perhaps it was all a self-serving ploy: at the time it was rumored that Nero had started the fire himself in order to make space for a new, more beautiful palace. But whatever the reason, it is clear that rather than taking responsibility for the people he ruled, Emperor Nero shirked his duty in dramatic fashion, thereby becoming an emblem for irresponsibility.

While Mother Teresa and Emperor Nero provide extreme historical examples of responsibilities assumed and shirked, more ordinary instances abound in contemporary society. Our focus in this chapter falls on the workplace. In most work settings, some team players can be counted on to stay until the job is completed while some leave as soon as their part is done, regardless of the state of the project. Some are committed to seeing a project succeed while others are content seeing themselves succeed. Why are some people willing to put themselves on the line in order to resolve a tough problem while others around them think it more prudent to withdraw? (Compare Horn and Gardner, Chapter Eleven, this volume.) How, that is, do some people acquire a sense of ultimate responsibility for the way things turn out?

The Psychology of Ultimate Responsibility

In recent years, psychologists have taken an interest in life goals. Such goals have been referred to, variously, as “current concerns” (Klinger, 1977), “life tasks” (Cantor, 1990), “personal projects” (Little, 1989), “personal goals” (Brunstein, 1993), and “personal strivings” (Emmons, 1999). In the Emmons formulation, which is closest to our own framework, personal strivings are aimed at enduring objectives that motivate the person’s behavior over the long haul (Emmons, 1999). Many people strive for enduring objectives in their lives, but there is enormous variation in the intensity of their strivings, in how well articulated the strivings are, and in how much influence they exert on the person’s life choices. Personal strivings that are especially profound, long-lasting, and central to the person’s identity (who I am, what I’m here for, what I’m trying to accomplish with my life, what kind of person I want to be) are considered ultimate concerns that transcend and guide the person’s lower-level goals. (Emmons, 1999).

Ultimate concerns differ from other types of personal goals in important ways. A personal goal, such as acing a math test or finding a date to the spring prom, is typically short-term; in contrast, an ultimate concern, such as finding a cure for cancer, reflects a long-term purpose that subsumes a string of short-term goals. Short-term goals can act as means towards the fulfillment of ultimate concerns (or they may come and go on their own, without larger significance). Ultimate concerns, however, are ends in themselves. An ultimate concern may serve as an organizing feature for one’s personal goals. Returning to the cancer example, someone may have the short-term goal of getting a high mark on a test in order to be admitted into a competitive college so that he or she can go on to medical school and begin researching cancer cures. In this way, personal goals may move the individual closer to achieving an ultimate concern.

People with ultimate concerns usually act in service of those interests, and such activity can provide profound and enduring sense of purpose for their lives. A purpose may reflect a commitment to faith, a social cause, a talent, or a domain. A purpose may be noble or ignoble. Hitler clearly had a purpose in his life, though it was surely not a moral one. Although distinguishing between noble and ignoble purposes can be difficult, it is possible; however, that challenge is beyond the scope of this chapter.²

In a study of adolescents, we interviewed a seventeen-year-old girl whose ultimate concern was caring for the environment. She felt it was her duty as a human being to preserve and protect her natural surroundings.

What I believe is that God created [the environment], and God created [it] for us to take care of it.... All those little trees out there, and every bird that flies and every unique sunset and sunrise, was created by God for me to be able to see and enjoy, but if I don’t take care of it, it’s not going to be there for me to enjoy. So I guess that’s one of the big parts of why I’m so passionate about what I do. Because this is given to me, for me to take care of, so I need to do my part for it to be there later for somebody else. [Bronk, 2005, p. 214]

This young woman did not just talk about her passion; she eagerly tackled a local environmental problem. Farmers with no place to dispose of significant amounts of motor oil were pouring it into their fields and the oil was beginning to contaminate the local water supply and damage the vegetation. This enterprising young woman started an innovative oil recycling program that became so successful that it was eventually implemented statewide. Creating and expanding the oil recycling program gave her life a purpose because she was able to work toward her ultimate concern of conservation. She then enrolled in a college environmental engineering program as a further means to advance her longstanding purpose and is eager to pursue a career toward that end as well (Bronk, 2005).

An ultimate concern may take a variety of forms. For some people, the call of a particular responsibility can become an ultimate concern—for example, responsibility to a person (such as a spouse or child), a community (such as one’s country or company), a cause (such as civil rights or liberty), a value (such as truth or compassion), or an ideal (such as personal integrity or excellent work). In such cases, responsibility may be fueled by a deeper purpose, often a moral one. Mother Teresa’s stated ultimate concern was serving God. That concern inspired a deep sense of responsibility for God’s children, particularly the neediest of them. Caring for God’s children provided a moral purpose for her life. In this way, Mother Teresa’s sense of responsibility, driven by a powerful moral purpose, became an essential and inextricable part of her ultimate concern.

When is responsibility guided by a deeper purpose? How does that happen? In this chapter we argue that responsibility is likely to become an ultimate concern when (1) it stems from a highly articulated sense of moral identity, (2) it reflects the moral purpose at the center of that moral identity, and (3) it is supported by an organized group of respected peers and mentors (such as a faith community, a profession, an army or business team, a nongovernmental organization, and so on). Such personal and social conditions maximize the likelihood that people will strive to take ultimate responsibility, although in the end this stance remains to some extent a personal choice subject to the vagaries of will. In other words, while such conditions make it likely that people will take ultimate responsibility, they do not guarantee it.

Moral Identity and Moral Purpose

People differ in the centrality of their moral concerns to their senses of who they are and who they want to be. For some, moral convictions largely define who they are—these are people with strong senses of moral identity. For others, material concerns (how much money they have, how powerful they happen to be, and so on) are far more central. It is the former who are most likely to act in accord with their moral beliefs. We have found that moral identity is the best predictor of a person’s commitment to moral action, because it determines not merely what the person considers to be the right course of action but also why the person would decide that “I myself must take this course.” For example, most persons will express the belief that allowing others to starve is morally wrong, but only some of these people will conclude that they themselves must do something to prevent this occurrence in a particular circumstance, such as a famine in Africa. Moral identity engenders a sense of personal responsibility for taking action: it provides a powerful incentive for conduct because it triggers a motive to act in accord with one’s conception of one’s ideal self. Moral judgment alone cannot provide this motive: it is only when people conceive of themselves and their life goals in moral terms that they acquire a strong propensity to act according to their moral judgments.

Colby and Damon (1992) found that the moral exemplars they studied were convinced that the work they were doing fulfilled both their personal and moral goals. People who define themselves in terms of their moral goals see moral problems in everyday events, and they see themselves as necessarily implicated in dealing with those problems. From this sense it is a direct step to taking responsibility for seeking a solution.

In the workplace, moral identity means defining the self in a way that includes not only work-related skills and interests, but also the purpose for one’s work, one’s sense of ethical restrictions, and one’s responsibility to one’s community. In this way, personal responsibility in the workplace is fostered by a strong moral identity.

Over the course of human development, when a person makes a moral choice regularly, the choice becomes habitual: a child who has learned to tell the truth does not usually need to decide whether to lie, cheat, or steal every time the chance arises. The honest behavior comes naturally—or to use a familiar idiom that in this case has psychological validity, it becomes “second nature.” Through a system of acquired action, the behavior becomes habitual. Well-established moral habits are commonly known as virtues, which in turn form the behavioral basis of moral character.

People who function at the highest levels, maximizing all their potentials, strive for a unity in the self as a kind of ultimate concern in itself (the concern of personal integrity). Although absolute unity is rarely achieved (other than by extraordinary moral exemplars with high degrees of moral commitment), every person can approach this ideal over time. Cultivating a strong moral identity—the sense that moral concerns play a primary role in determining who I am and who I want to be—is the psychological means to this end.

Often at the center of one’s moral identity a powerful moral purpose resides. The moral purpose may serve as an organizing feature for one’s moral identity, compelling an individual to define himself or herself not only in moral terms but also in terms of his or her moral purpose.

A moral purpose is a stable and generalized intention to accomplish something that is at once meaningful to the self and of consequence to the broader world (Damon, Menon, and Bronk, 2003). There are two important features of this definition. First, a purpose is a goal of sorts, but it represents a long-term aim rather than a short-term goal such as to learn a new computer program or to finish the laundry. Second, purpose is a part of one’s personal search for meaning, but it also has an external component: the desire to make a difference in the world, to contribute to matters larger than the self. Purpose is always directed at an accomplishment toward which one can make progress. This accomplishment may be material or nonmaterial, external or internal, reachable or unreachable. Its necessary characteristic is not its concreteness but the sense of direction it provides in creating an objective for purpose. Returning to the example of Mother Teresa is helpful here. Her purpose was to serve God, and this long-term, overarching aim clearly had an external focus. It served as a compass, providing direction throughout her life.

People who possess a moral purpose that is central to their lives feel obliged to act in service of that purpose. They feel responsible for its outcome. In this way, purpose may fuel a sense of personal responsibility.

In the empirical study mentioned earlier, we found a dozen adolescents who exhibited intense dedication to their individual purposes. Their commitments tended to be driven by a strong sense of moral identity (Bronk, 2005). In other words, their sense of who they were revolved around their purposes. So the environmentally minded young woman called herself “a tree hugger” and a religious adolescent described herself first and foremost as a Christian. The young people identified themselves by their purposes, and when this happened they felt personally responsible for working in service of their ultimate concerns. When a twelve-year-old boy learned that people in Africa were dying from a lack of clean drinking water, he felt personally responsible for raising the money to build wells in the neediest parts of the continent. His belief that he was ultimately responsible for providing clean drinking water likely resulted from a strong sense of moral identity, and in taking responsibility for the cause, he found a purpose for his life. Similarly, workers who find purpose in their jobs are more likely to take ultimate responsibility for resolving difficult issues at work.

Finally, a sense of ultimate responsibility is more likely to develop when social support for that effort exists. In the empirical study of adolescents, social support took the form of mentors, clubs, organized or informal groups of like-minded peers, faith communities, and supportive families (Bronk, 2005). In the workplace it may take the form of advisors, mentors, and professional associations.

In sum, regardless of the form it takes, social support in conjunction with a personal sense of moral identity and moral purpose maximizes the likelihood that people will develop a sense of ultimate responsibility for the work they do.

Ultimate Responsibility in the Workplace

In the GoodWork study, we sought out people with a deep sense of personal responsibility for their work. We conducted in-depth interviews with them to examin...