Seven Moralities of Human Resource Management

T. Klikauer

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137455765
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137455789
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Business

Seven Moralities of Human Resource Management analyses morality of HRM from the perspective of American psychologist Laurence Kohlberg. This book examines and makes value judgements on whether or not HRM is moral from the viewpoint of Kohlberg's seven stages of morality as a follow-up study of the author's 2012 book, Seven Management Moralities.

1

Morality 1: Disciplinary Action, Obedience, and Punishment

Stage 1 of the seven stage model indicates the lowest level of morality. It concerns obedience and punishment. As such it is intimately linked to a rather negative side of the human experience.¹³⁸ At this stage, human behaviour features obedience to authority and submission to punishment regimes, including the fear of punishment (MacKinnon 2013:158). This fear persists in many societies despite advances in criminology in the form of a move away from punishment and towards reforming people. A factual decline in crime rates, however, has been paralleled by an increase in crime reporting by corporate mass media. This leads to the popular view punishment is important in society.¹³⁹ The world of HRM is not isolated from these developments and punishment regimes are still prevalent in the form of punitive HR policies such as disciplinary action.¹⁴⁰ Under such regimes, HRM does not view individuals as human beings but as underlings, subordinates, and objects of HR power.¹⁴¹ They are perceived to be in need of domestication as outlined in McGregor’s Theory X.¹⁴²

Historically, this has been the task of 18^th and 19^th century workhouses, prison-factories, and the like.¹⁴³ These were places from which the factory administration of the ‘Satanic Mills’, personnel management, and later HRM originated.¹⁴⁴ The ‘M’ in HRM is found in ‘maneggiare’ which means to handle tools and horse domestication (cf. French manège for riding school, Salle du Manège). This equates horses with human beings while viewing both as tools to be handled through disciplining.¹⁴⁵ The moral ‘human→human’ relationship is relinquished and replaced by the immoral ‘human→horse’ relationship that HRM continues as superior→subordinate relationship in which underlings are often forced to act according to a Nietzsche-like will of HRM.¹⁴⁶ In such regimes underlings are made to fear punishment from above while HRM creates the appearance of being the sole source of authoritarian power.¹⁴⁷ Guiding principles are fear, anxiety, force, retribution, cruelty, ‘strike-back’ vengeance, and even mental and physical terror created by those in authority.¹⁴⁸

In HRM terms, these are fair and unfair, lawful and unlawful discriminations, harassment, social exclusion, betrayal, vengeance, ostracism, stereotyping, invasion of privacy (drug testing, etc.), bullying by HRM against interviewees during recruitment and selection, during promotion and performance assessments, etc.¹⁴⁹ In sum, while HRM textbooks pretend that HRM fights against these forms of violence and terror appearing as protector, it simultaneously is structurally empowered to use these methods against employees as perpetrator because of HRM’s organisational position of having direct – for example disciplinary – power over people. This is not conceptualised in HRM. Meanwhile inside managerial regimes, HRM – like management in general – appears to be defined by a staunch lack of self-reflection and self-criticism.

The three philosophers who have predominantly dealt with such regimes are Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli (1469–1527), Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900).¹⁵⁰ None of them, however, is a prime exponent of moral philosophy. Machiavelli was not a philosopher but a strategic political writer focusing mainly on power, how to achieve, and how to maintain it. Power was to be used in support of and as a benefit to The Prince (1532) – his most important work. Hobbes and Nietzsche were more concerned with personal advantage over others than with punishment (Koritansky 2011). Hobbes saw this as bellum omnium contra omnes meaning ‘the war of all against all’.¹⁵¹ Nietzsche viewed it as exercising the right of the strong superhuman against the weak.¹⁵² Nevertheless, significant and more modern contributions to the ethics of punishment and obedience have been made. The American psychologist and moralist Stanley Milgram (1933–1984) and the Polish-British moral philosopher Zygmunt Bauman (born 1925) have significantly advanced psychological and philosophical understanding of punishment and obedience. Milgram’s obedience theories and Bauman’s 20^th century masterpiece Modernity and the Holocaust remain fundamental. Like Lawrence Kohlberg (1927–1987), Milgram and Bauman were concerned with perhaps the most elementary question of the 20^th century: how could the Nazi Holocaust happen? Like Kohlberg, they thought that obedience to authority was linked to the immorality of the punishment regimes in German concentration camps.¹⁵³

In order to discuss the first stage of the morality of obedience to authority and punishment, the proceeding chapter has, after a short general overview, two key parts. Part one deepens our understanding of the implications and moral relevance that Milgram’s philosophy and his empirical findings on obedience have for HRM.¹⁵⁴ The second part relates Bauman’s ethics of punishment to HRM. A brief introduction provides some core elements relevant to obedience to authority and punishment regimes.

During the mid-20^th century, behavioural scientists such as the American behaviourist Burrhus Frederic Skinner (1904–1990) began to notice the effects of the fear of punishment.¹⁵⁵ Skinner himself viewed this as ‘…what a fascinating thing! Total control of a living organism’.¹⁵⁶ He found that people can be manipulated by the fear of punishment and their behaviours can be re-designed. Punishment – along with positive and negative reinforcement – became core elements of Skinner’s theory on conditioning. HRM and organisational psychology call this ‘behaviour modification’ or more truthfully ‘manipulation’.¹⁵⁷

Smith (1982:58) noted that in the biological, animalistic, and mechanical Skinner model people were regarded as reactive victims of environmental causal forces with no freedom of choice or capacity for self-direction.¹⁵⁸ Skinner’s conditioning theory has been eagerly picked up by the aforementioned Servants of Power (Baritz 1960). It entered virtually very single HRM textbook in the form of organisational behaviour and organisational psychology. The Servants of Power applied behaviourist models to HRM in a linear, accepting, unquestioning, and positivist mode. As a consequence, HRM has established rafts of performance measures with wages and salaries being the key elements of positive reinforcement.¹⁵⁹ Negative reinforcement is represented by the withdrawal and withholding of privileges, while punishment is represented in demotions, explicit threats to cut the piece rate, reprimands, dismissals, wage cuts, disciplinary action, etc.¹⁶⁰ Not surprisingly, the resulting relationships at work often represent Jackall’s (1988 & 2006) ‘Moral Maze’ as designed by behaviourism. The morality of behaviourism can be summed up as stated by Kohn (1993:24 & 26): the underlying assumption [of behaviourism], according to one critic, seems to be that ‘the semi-starved rat in the box, with virtually nothing to do but press on a lever for food, captures the essence of virtually all human behaviour’. In Chomsky’s critique (1971:33) of Skinnerian manipulation techniques, he highlighted that except when physically restrained, a person is the least free or dignified when he is under threat of punishment.¹⁶¹

For moral philosophy, behaviourism is full of ethical problems. Next to Greek and modern virtue ethics (cf. friendship, affection, and a feeling of solidarity, Adorno 1944 & 1971), Kantian ethics (self-determination), Hegelian ethics (self-actualisation), and utilitarianism (happiness principle), one of the most radically opposite ideas to live under behaviourist punishment regimes comes from the moral philosophy of existentialism. The core of existentialism rests on the premises that there is no once and for all given ‘inherent’ human nature but that our existence rests on social forces; that the concept of radical freedom is linked to self-determination; that being human means being free; that the invention of so-called ‘I must…’ necessities are delusions; and that radical freedom means accepting responsibility.¹⁶²

The moral philosophy of existentialism rejects behaviourism as immoral. Yet, despite the contradiction between behaviourism and three major moral philosophies, namely Aristotle, Kant, and utilitarianism, HRM still relies heavily on behaviourism as virtually every textbook on HRM testifies. HR performance measures, key performance indicators (Nankervis et al. 2014:199f.), performance related pay, etc. are based on the HR assumption that workers are inherently lazy and need to be forced to work (McGregor’s Theory X). Hence, they need to be manipulated through punishment to manipulate their ‘human’ behaviour into ‘organisational’ behaviour for performance, i.e. shareholder-value and profit-maximisation.¹⁶³ False assumptions like these are as often uncritically accepted and endlessly rehearsed as Maslow’s ‘Hierarchy of Needs’.¹⁶⁴

Nevertheless, moral philosophy rejects the positivism of so-called ‘given facts’ that are portrayed as a once-and-for-all determined natural hierarchy. According to moral philosophy, rather than depicting human nature, assumptions like the hierarchy of needs and the basic assumptions of behaviourism are socially constructed.¹⁶⁵ The pretended positivism remains ‘pre’-scriptive rather than ‘de’-scriptive. This is the reason why many textbooks contain the thought-limiting and disabling rather than enabling Maslowian hierarchy.¹⁶⁶ The second reason why The Servants of Power view Maslow as relevant is because hierarchies and hierarchical thinking support HRM. Both Maslow’s and HRM’s hierarchy are made to appear natural and unchangeable. Hierarchies please political masters, HRM, and the market for HR textbooks. They confirm HRM’s system rather than producing the truth about humans and humanity.

Ethics contains the concept of human freedom which clearly rejects one of HRM’s favourite ideologies, the idea that people have a hierarchy of needs that is set once and for all. But ethics is negated by HRM which creates conditions of unfreedom under the ideological cover of self-invented necessities such as the usual justification of unavoidable performance implying performance management is ideologically linked to market determinism, economic necessities, and the like (Beder 2006). In HR textbooks determinism is typically covered up with invented facts-of-life examples. Such HRM-like constructed deformations of human life negate human freedom but stabilise asymmetrical power relations between HRM and their underlings. Finally, if ethics denotes that being human means being free, then HRM negates this by creating humans who suffer unfreedom. To HRM, humans are no more than human resources/materials – Menschenmaterial¹⁶⁷ – ‘that’(!) represent a cost-factor and costs have always to be kept low.¹⁶⁸ These are ‘the hard facts of life’, as HRM would say.¹⁶⁹ HRM calls its focus on numbers, head-counts, and the invented ‘hard facts of life’ ‘hard-HRM’.¹⁷⁰ Human freedom does not feature inside ‘hard’ HRM’s cost-benefit thinking and if it enters it, it is seen as merely a cost. Meanwhile, being human is only of value to HRM if it means being a human resource.

Being free and the absence of external forces that impede freedom are two of the core elements of almost all versions of ethics ranging from Aristotle to utilitarianism, Kant, Hegel, Rawls, Bauman, and Adorno. The fear of punishment is an impediment to human freedom and dignity (Bolton 2007). In other words, it is not only punishment itself but the fear of it that eradicates the morality of freedom and dignity. The fear of punishment is only superseded by physical restraints – slave labour – as the strongest form of denial of freedom.¹⁷¹ Today, HRM hardly restrains ‘those who make things’ (Aristotle) physically. But the threat and fear of punishment has not ceased. In Skinner’s model of obedience, punishment avoidance operates in a highly dictatorial system operated by people in authority. For example, adults who were raised in authoritarian homes under strict, harsh, inconsistent, and emotionally repressive parental regimes are left with a weak ego and low self-esteem (Miller 2002). They are the ideal raw material for the human-being→human-resources conversion. They have been made totally dependent on pleasing (positive reinforcement) and obeying their parents. This structure is carried over into authoritarian schooling (headmaster), the army (sergeant), university (professor), and finally into work (HR-director).¹⁷² This represents the total negation of Kant’s ethics of self-determination, Hegel’s ethics of self-actualisation, and Adorno’s ethics of ‘Mündigkeit’ (Adorno 1971). Virtually all individuals put through today’s education systems are exposed to these authoritarian forms that systematically condition individuals based on behaviourism using brownie points, stars, marks, and HRM’s extrinsic-vs.-intrinsic rewards.¹⁷³

In behaviourism as such as well as in HRM’s application of it, there are always those who control and those who are controlled whether in laboratory situations or ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue: The Seven Moralities of Human Resource Management
• Introduction: Human Resource Management and Seven Moral Philosophies
• Chapter 1 Morality 1: Disciplinary Action, Obedience, and Punishment
• Chapter 2 Morality 2: Performance Management and Rewards
• Chapter 3 Morality 3: Organisational Culture and Workplace Training
• Chapter 4 Morality 4: The Legal Context, Fairness, and Equality
• Chapter 5 Morality 5: HRM and Utilitarianism
• Chapter 6 Morality 6: HRM and Universalism
• Chapter 7 Morality 7: Sustainability and the Natural Environment
• Chapter 8 Conclusion: Seven Moralities of HRM Examining HRM Textbooks and Beyond
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index