INTRODUCTION 15Watson concentrates on giving a sociological explanation for HR man-
agers’ behaviour and influence in workplaces. As agents of industrial capitalist
organizations, HR managers are governed by the institutional setting and its
required role performances. They are not free to introduce ethical criteria
exclusively in or on their own terms. Their primary role is to manage the
employment relationship with the purpose of sustaining the viability of the
organization. Thus, HR managers operate within social, structural, political,
and economic limitations and are unable to make entirely free ethical choices.
Even so, they still have the opportunity to make some difference, but only so
far as moral choice and ethical actions are seen by the management to coexist
with business interests.
Chapter 14 by Joshua Margolis, Adam Grant, and Andrew Molinsky
(Expanding ethical standards of HRM: necessary evils and the multiple
dimensions of impact) examines moral problems which appear when
wrestling with necessary evils. They discuss the distinctive ethical challenges
that arise in organizations and investigate how managers can navigate such
challenges with practical effectiveness and moral integrity. It is argued that
professionals often must perform ‘necessary evils’, difficult and often unset-
tling tasks that require harming other human beings in order to advance a
worthy purpose. Consequently, this chapter seeks to provide practical guid-
ance on the age-old moral problem of minimizing harm to others when
serving the greater good.
The authors commence by acknowledging the unpleasant fact of organiza-
tional life that managers engage in acts that harm people. Understanding how
managers perform ethically challenging tasks, and providing advice for hand-
ling these tasks, are therefore significant responsibilities for organizational
researchers. The relatively large volume of research conducted on procedural
justice identifies a number of guidelines for treating people consistently and
equitably: granting voice to individuals, providing justifiable explanations for
decisions and actions, and expressing compassion to those affected. Inter-
estingly, studies show that people are then more willing to accept negative
outcomes and less likely to respond in a destructive manner when outcomes
are delivered with procedural justice.
Margolis, Grant, and Molinsky draw on two streams of research to examine
how in ethically challenging situations, managers can improve their conduct
and ameliorate the responses they receive from the affected employees. The
first stream focuses on how necessary evils are performed, and the second
focuses on HR managers’ attainment of positive impact by developing their
awareness and skills in dealing with others. The authors then proceed by
presenting and explaining three ethical standards for governing HR practice:
Standard # 1, advance the organization’s objective; Standard # 2, enhance the