Ethical Dilemmas Within Organisations During the COVID-19

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During crises and uncertainty, businesses face the pressure of making critical and fast decisions with the potential of shaping the lives of employees, stakeholders, and the organization’s future. There have been many cases of organizations quickly making employees redundant or closing operations during the COVID-19 crisis. Some of the decisions have damaged the respective firms’ reputations. In the UK, for example, Britannia Hotel was criticized in the media for dismissing all its employees and evicting them from the company-owned accommodation facility during the early phase of COVID-19 (Keyden and Houghton, 2020). The move left the workers who were dependent on the Hotel jobless, homeless, and vulnerable. Organizations have been under pressure to do the right thing and treat their human resources fairly. Responsible business is not a concept that emerged with the COVID-19 crisis, but it took on a fresh resonance during this time (Critchley, 2007). There has been a need for organizations to adopt multiple ethical frameworks when undertaking critical decisions such as employee redundancy in a manner that draws upon behavioral ethics (De Clercq et al., 2020). The case of Britannia Hotel shows the need for organizations to make consistent and coherent decisions based on at least two ethical normative theories.

From a utilitarian perspective, businesses should focus on attaining the greatest good of most people. In this case, the management of Britannia Hotel terminated employees who had done nothing wrong to compromise the business of the company. The decision was, therefore, not good for the affected employees (Conway et al., 2018). The terminated workers had had their jobs the previous day, which seized to exist on the day of termination. The employees were guaranteed regular salaries, health insurance, career development, social interaction at the place of work with fellow workers, and titles to relate with as a form of identity. However, these were all gone in the wake of the pandemic not because the staffs were incompetent, but the management felt that the employee was no longer needed (Keyden and Houghton, 2020). The ethical issue arises from the notion that employee worked satisfactorily to contribute to the hotel’s success, but was suddenly denied the right to be part of the hotel’s future (Kahane et al., 2018). It explains why the dismissed employees used social media platforms to express their anger with the management.

The moral analysis of the acts of the management of Britannia Hotel can also be analyzed based on the ethics of duties with an emphasis on the individual. Mustajoki (2017) believes that what leaders in organizations can or cannot do depends on their examination of the duties of individual employees. If the manager has to retain the employee the duty results from the employee’s right. In many companies, the management bears the duty of determining whether to keep or dismiss staff (Sayegh, 2020). In this case, leaders have the moral obligation to make either decision, and the workers do not have any rights constraining the freedom of the manager to perform his duty. Kant’s approach, therefore, leads to the conclusion that under the ethics of duties based perspective, the management of Britannia Hotel was not morally prohibited to make the staff redundant. Both Mustajoki (2017) and Sayegh (2020) argue that leaders have duties by the positions they hold to ensure the company’s best interests. The COVID-19 crisis presented an extreme case, in which dismissal of staff was the immediate means available to save the hotel, and failure to act would have been considered unethical.

The rights and justice approach can also be applied in the analysis of Britannia Hotel’s case. Magrizos and Roumpi (2020) argue that the central question in addressing ethical dilemmas is about the fairness decisions made. It is assumed that the staff of the organization had performed well and did not trigger the termination of their employment. In this case, there is no proportion between the acts of the management and the satisfactory performance of the workers (Critchley, 2007). Besides, the company never followed any principle of consistency, considering that even the best-performing employees lost their jobs. According to Tao and Kim (2017), the principle of consistency is sometimes used to fairly dismiss part of human resources. However, the discussion of fairness is likely to change in a case where all employees were laid off. Rather than reducing labor costs by carrying out a partial redundancy, the hotel decided to close resulting in all employees losing their jobs. Using the rights and justice approach, the decision taken by the management of Britannia Hotel was certainly not a fair arrangement.

The emphasis on the rights and justice approach goes beyond just the individual, which is contrary to the ethics of duties approach. Lipponen et al. (2018) state that focusing on the issue of rights and justice can help address consistency in conducting the dismissals, but within a narrower setting compared to the utilitarian approach. Out of the three perspectives used in Britannia Hotel’s ethical analysis, utilitarianism considers the greatest good for employees. However, this approach fails to consider important individual concerns affecting other stakeholders (Kahane et al., 2018). On the other hand, the ethics of duties approach focuses on individuals by looking out the issue from the duty imposed on the management. Lastly, the rights and justice approach is interested in ensuring the well-being of the employees and the company.

Having applied three common theories to understanding the nature of individual ethical experience in managerial ethics in the case of Britannia Hotel, three theories coincide. The management of the hotel opted for an extreme means to save the company. A utilitarian approach condemns this decision because it generated harm for the greatest number. The ethics of duty approach validates the situation as moral considering that the management had absolute determination on the fate of the jobs. Finally, the rights and justice approach finds a lack of proportionality between the performance of the employees and the termination of employment, which makes the act unjust. However, the management’s decision to dismiss all employees shifts the debate from injustice to individual employees to fairness for the whole system. Given that the COVID-19 crisis required redundancy to be conducted, ethics of duty and rights and justice approaches find merit on a moral base.

Reference List

Conway, P., Goldstein-Greenwood, J., Polacek, D. and Greene, J. D. (2018). ‘Sacrificial utilitarian judgments do reflect concern for the greater good: clarification via process dissociation and the judgments of philosophers’. Cognition, 179, pp. 241-265.

Critchley, S. (2007). Infinitely demanding: ethics of commitment, politics of resistance. Michigan: Verso Trade.

De Clercq, D., Azeem, M. U., Haq, I. U. and Bouckenooghe, D. (2020). ‘The stress-reducing effect of coworker support on turnover intentions: moderation by political ineptness and despotic leadership’. Journal of Business Research, 111, pp. 12-24.

Kahane, G. et al., (2018). ‘Beyond sacrificial harm: a two-dimensional model of utilitarian psychology’. Psychological Review, 125(2), pp. 131-164.

Keyden, N. and Houghton, T. (2020). ‘Coronavirus: Britannia Hotels branch fires staff and kicks them out, blaming Covid-19 outbreak’. Business Live.

Lipponen, J., Steffens, N. K. and Holtz, B. C. (2018). ‘Prototypical supervisors shape lay‐off victims’ experiences of top management justice and organizational support’. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 91(1), pp. 158-180.

Magrizos, S. and Roumpi, D. (2020). ‘Doing the right thing or doing things right? The role of ethics of care and ethics of justice in human resource management of social enterprises’. Strategic Change, 29(4), pp. 485-496.

Mustajoki, H. (2017). A new approach to research ethics: Using guided dialogue to strengthen research communities. 1^st edn. New York: Taylor & Francis.

Sayegh, A. G. (2020). ‘Moral duties, compliance and polycentric climate governance’. International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics, 20(3), pp. 483-506.

Tao, W. and Kim, S. (2017). ‘Application of two under-researched typologies in crisis communication: ethics of justice vs. care and public relations vs. legal strategies’. Public Relations Review, 43(4), pp. 690-699.

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Ethical Dilemmas Within Organisations During the COVID-19

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