Virtue at Work: Ethics for Individuals, Managers, and Organizations

by Geoff Moore

The point is simply that, in living lives mostly inside practices, and pursuing the goods of practices, we will also need to consider the ordering, or the relative priority, of each of these practices in our lives, and how these lead to the overall good of our lives. And we will, therefore, need to consider life as a whole, not just as a series of unrelated practices, and to review it on occasions, as the second part of the quotation above indicates.

But equally clearly, it is likely to be one of the most significant practices given the amount of time and energy which it often demands.

While, as we said there, we might more naturally think of this as being about human flourishing and moral development, the point is that engaging in practices, including those at work, makes a difference (for good or ill) to us. And in the ideal, we should find that our involvement in our work practice develops us as people, enabling us to realize our true telos.

Or it could alienate us.

On this understanding, we as individuals should take very seriously the opportunities our work in organizations offers for our flourishing and moral development, including a critical awareness that this may not always be for our good.

And we should expect, and perhaps even demand, that organizations offer work which is rewarding in this respect, while recognizing that this requires just as much of an input from our side as from the organization’s.

Work then, at least for the masses, was often soulless and dispiriting, and many of those commenting upon it railed against the effect on ordinary workers.

Boring, mundane, monotonous, or, as above, soulless and dispiriting work might well have the opposite effect, leading to meaninglessness rather than meaningfulness.

This links directly to the ideas which we have already considered—that the internal goods of practices, the product or service and the perfection of the practitioners in the process, should make a contribution to the common good of the community. Without that, the work we engage in is clearly not meaningful.

The subjective dimension, then, is that the work should be meaningful to the individual who carries it out. Hence, meaningful work is ‘work that the subject finds fulfilling, and which contributes to or connects positively with something the value of which has its source outside the subject’.

However, the objective aspect of meaningful work and the potential problems with it—how would we get consensus on whether a particular job is meaningful or not?—is something we have already considered in Chapter 4 and above in relation to the extent to which the internal goods of any practice contribute to the common good.

We would hope that the primary motivation was about the promotion of health among members of the community so that they were enabled to lead more fulfilling lives. We would, in other words, hope that a sense of calling was the main reason the doctor chose that occupation, and that intrinsic motivation overshadowed extrinsic motivation.

One point which emerges from this scenario is that managers, as those who are ‘professional’ organizers and coordinators, are distinct from management,1 in the sense of the kinds of organizing and coordinating which everyone, including managers of course, have to do some of, and which goes on all the time in a whole variety of different ways, beginning with ‘self-management’ at the individual level. But it is those who spend most or all of their time organizing and coordinating activities and other people, who we typically refer to as managers.

In other words, MacIntyre was arguing that managers who, like organizations, have become ubiquitous in the modern world, are engaged in manipulative relationships which turn others into means to whichever end a particular manager might be seeking to achieve.

In other words, managers allow themselves, and are allowed, to manipulate others simply because this is the most effective way to get things done: the ends justify the means.

MacIntyre was, in effect, arguing that managers act as though they are operating in a world characterized by the kind of cause-and-effect relationships with which we are familiar in the natural sciences—drop an apple and it will fall, for example. But via a lengthy argument for which we do not have the space here,14 he demonstrated that in the social sciences generalizations were few and far between, and that they generally lacked predictive power. He concluded in characteristic fashion that, ‘the salient fact about those sciences is the absence of the discovery of any law-like generalizations whatsoever’.

It is managers whose primary responsibility seems to be to pursue these, and as a result managers can be seen as ‘cultivators of consumptive acquisitiveness’,21 or as proponents of the vice of pleonexia, ‘the drive to have more and more’22 which, in modern societies, has become a virtue rather than a vice, or so MacIntyre has argued. And, developing MacIntyre’s thought somewhat, it has also been argued that managers, in pursuing external goods such as profit, and hence the scale economies which enable these, become destroyers of small-scale communities of virtue.

And so, in an area where she does have more agency, she goes beyond what DesignCo expects in terms of staff appraisal and development (another bureaucratic system which many of the other managers in DesignCo see in minimalist terms). She is trying to develop her small team of architects so that they each become the very best possible architect of which they are capable. She is trying hard to ensure that she and they do not lose their love of architecture.

On this account, then, managers are moral agents, even if that agency is constrained, and should be in a position to draw on the internal goods from this particular practice in their lives in their narrative quest towards their own telos.

Of course, there are generic features of management, a general body of knowledge and techniques, as we have seen above. But managers need to be aware that the institution they are engaged in making and sustaining has at its heart a core practice, and they need to appreciate that this is both the focal point and part of the context in which they carry out their craft.

At the left-hand side of this diagram we have what we might characterize as first-line supervisors. These are people who spend most of their time directly involved with the core practice, but in their supervisory role they are engaged in ‘the making and sustaining of the institution’ even if this is only to a limited degree. At the right-hand side of the diagram we have senior managers who are mostly involved in making and sustaining the institution. But senior managers should recognize that they also need to remain engaged with the core practice, even if to only a limited degree. And it is worth noting that, on this account, many people will actually engage in these two practices when at work and so will have the possibility of obtaining the internal goods from both.

That is, the virtuous manager would be concerned about the ends the organization serves, and the extent to which both its products or services and the ‘perfection’ of its members (the internal goods of the core practice but also, in the latter case, of the secondary practice of making and sustaining the institution itself) contribute to the common good. That is, in shorthand, that the virtuous manager would be concerned for the good purpose of the organization.

But at the top end of the organization, as we have seen, this will require that senior managers engage in a debate both internally (in a board of directors or as trustees, for example) and in the community, about what the internal goods of the practice are, and the way they contribute to the common good.

Recall again MacIntyre’s claim that, ‘In contemporary societies our common goods can only be determined in concrete and particular terms through widespread, grassroots, shared, rational deliberation’.40 It is the role of senior managers in particular to engage in that deliberation, and to put in place appropriate structures to facilitate it.

The second characteristic of a virtuous manager follows from all that we have said so far about the framework which MacIntyre offers us. Managers should be concerned about the core practice of the organization and about those who practice their craft there. This is for several fairly obvious reasons. First, the organization as a practice-institution combination depends on the core practice—without it, there quite simply is no organization. Thus, there is an instrumental reason for maintaining this concern for the core practice. And this continued engagement with and conce...

The second reason for being concerned about the core practice, and a somewhat ‘higher’ reason than the instrumental one given above, is that it is the internal goods of the core practice, the goods or services it produces or provides, which have the potential to contribute to the common good. The virtuous manager, concerned about the ends of the organization, would seek to ensure excellence in the core practice since this is what leads to internal goods which have the potential to make a contribution to the common good.

The third reason for being concerned about the core practice is also to do with internal goods, but in this case it is the internal good of the ‘perfection’ of the practitioners in the process. As we saw in Chapter 4, a fundamental part of the common good is having virtuous individuals making good decisions and carrying out good actions on behalf of themselves, their families, and the various organizations which make up a community, including the political organizations of government. And the organizations in which we work, and the practices in which we thereby take part, have an important contribution to make to this.

And this leads directly to the third characteristic of the virtuous manager, which is that this concern for the ‘perfection’ of practitioners should lead to an attempt to provide meaningful work for them.

Having established these first three characteristics of the virtuous manager (a concern for ends, and for the core practice of the organization and those who practise their craft there, and hence for the provision of meaningful work), we turn to consider a fourth characteristic.

The manager’s role is to do with the making and sustaining of the institution, and institutions, as we have seen, are characteristically and necessarily concerned with external goods—money, other material goods, power, status, and, perhaps most generically, success. It follows, therefore, that managers should also be concerned about such things.

That the organization has sufficient amounts of these external goods is clearly essential to its survival and development. In that sense, making a profit as far as a business is concerned, or running a surplus as far as not-for-profit organizations in the public and voluntary sectors are concerned, is unproblematic. But it is unpro...

As far as the virtuous manager is concerned, the appropriate pursuit of external goods may also lead to the need to resist those inside or outside the organization who promote the achievement of external goods to too great an extent.

The fifth characteristic of the virtuous manager is to do with something we might call the ‘mode of institutionalization’ of the organization.

We might ask which mode of institutionalization of DesignCo (a partnership or a limited company) is likely to be most conducive to organizational virtue. And while not at all wishing to preclude virtuous shareholder-owned companies, the point, in relation to being a virtuous manager, is that the mode of institutionalization should be a concern.

In addition, the external environment (the regulatory environment provided by government, the market environment of firms and consumers, the labour environment of workers and their pursuit, or otherwise, of meaningful work, and the financial market environment and the extent to which this is focused on external goods), is bound to affect the extent to which an organization can pursue virtue, and hence the extent to which managers within the organization can do so.

And this may, therefore, lead to a requirement for the virtuous manager to resist the environment, just as he may have to resist his own compartmentalization, to resist inappropriate constraints on his agency, and to resist those inside the organization who promote the achievement of external goods to too great an extent.

Resistance, it seems, may be required in a number of areas of virtuous managerial activity—a point to which we will return shortly.

So practical wisdom helps us to see what the common good is, and since the pursuit of the common good is one of the concerns of the virtuous manager, so she needs practical wisdom to help in determining, with others, just what that might be. Virtuous managers have, following this, been called ‘wise stewards’.

But there is also the opposite danger, which is that the practice might become somewhat self-satisfied and complacent, and so no longer pursue ‘best practice’. This is likely to be because of individual practitioners no longer exercising the virtues, and it may therefore be difficult for those same practitioners to realize that this has come about. It may then be the role of the institution, which should be aware of best practice elsewhere, to call the practice back to the pursuit of excellence, partly because that is what it should do anyway, and partly to protect the external goods which derive from the excellence of the internal goods. In other words, the practice-institution combination should be a self-correcting mechanism in this regard.

The third characteristic of a virtuous organization relates to the ‘perfection’ of practitioners, and therefore links back to the discussions of the flourishing and moral development of organizational members in Chapter 4, and of meaningful work in Chapters 5 and 6

But, again as we saw in Chapter 6, practical wisdom also plays another role in that it is the key virtue which directs the organization towards the achievement of a good purpose. At the individual level, as we saw, the exercise of practical wisdom enables the individual to direct her activities towards the common good. If we transfer that understanding to the organizational level, it is practical wisdom which enables the virtuous pursuit of the organization’s good purpose, enabling the organization to think through how it is that the products or services it provides, and the way in which it develops organizational members, make a contribution to the common good, and what more and what else it might do in this regard.

Another way of putting this is to say that traditions never stand still—they are always being redefined by arguments from within them as well as by challenges from outside of them (often other, competing traditions). But, allowing for this level of argumentation and change, a tradition must have achieved a relative degree of stability to be accorded the status of a tradition. So these traditions are influential in our lives, and it is within these traditions that we live and pursue our own narrative quests.

Recall that virtues are ‘dispositions not only to act in particular ways but also to feel in particular ways’,25 so that virtues differ substantially from values which have an external, rather than internal, focus. So a virtuous organization would seek to be just to the very core of its being, and irrespective of whether this led to success.

On this understanding, as the definition of organizational character states, organizational virtues and character tend to be excellence-oriented, guiding the organization towards achieving its good purpose, while also recognizing the role which external goods (success) play in achieving this.

We have already discussed this at length, but the point which needs to be made here is that a parameter for crowding in virtue is to develop inclusive mechanisms for enabling the debate about what the internal goods of the organization are (both the excellence of the products or services and the ‘perfection’ of individual members), and how they contribute to the common good. An obvious place to start is with the board or governing body since here one might expect the most influence to lie.

This will involve ensuring that the views of particular constituencies, and in particular those of the institution, are not privileged over those of others, and in particular those who participate in the core practice, and this will therefore require that ‘power-balanced structures’30 are put in place.

This discussion also points to a broader point about the self-reinforcing nature of these parameters for crowding in virtue. An organization which has a good purpose, employs those with a pro-social intrinsic motivation, gives them meaningful practice-based work, and engages them in the governance of the organization, is unlikely to have too much difficulty with performance-related issues.

But MacIntyre has also set lower limits to practices in that particular activities, requiring particular skills, are not in themselves practices—recall that bricklaying, for example, is not a practice while architecture is.2

And, in the case of the financial sector, that is precisely what MacIntyre was saying; it is always about the external good of money. Recall that for an organization to have a good purpose its internal goods (the excellence of its products or services and the ‘perfection’ of its practitioners) needs to contribute to the common good.

The implication of this, using MacIntyre’s categories, is that traditional banking was, at the very least, practice-like, whereas new banking is not. And it is worth noting that the very terminology of traditional banking reminds us of MacIntyre’s point about practices having histories, and of traditions, which we saw in Chapter 7, and of the need for virtues to sustain and strengthen traditions.

And this might seem to hold out the possibility that organizations which have largely lost their practice-like features, focusing almost exclusively on external goods and losing any sense of serving the common good, still have within themselves the possibility that they might be redeemable.