HRM—LIMITS OF ETHICAL ACTION 225At the core of Weber’s notion (1949) of ethical irrationality is the belief
that no ethical system can be established that will make every value consistent
with every other or ensure that right actions always lead to right outcomes—
or, indeed, wrong actions necessarily lead to wrong outcomes. This creates
enormous problems for anyone trying to generalize about how HRM, or any
other activity for that matter, can be made ‘more ethical’ in any incontestable
manner. Weber wrote that ‘it is not true that good can follow only from good
and evil only from evil, but that often the opposite is true’ (2005: 267). He
reinforces this point powerfully: ‘Anyone who fails to see this is, indeed, a
political infant’ (Weber 2005). Here we see theaxiologicaldimension of the
irrationality principle that the social world is full of different human goals,
interests, purposes, and values and that these are often irreconcilable.
The relevance of this axiological principle to HR work can be illustrated
with a set of events I observed and participated in when working in the HR
department of an aerospace company. During some rather difficult business
circumstances, a decision was required about how to handle the employ-
ment of a long-serving and very senior engineer who had, in the past, made
innovations which had benefited the business considerably. With changes in
technology, this individual’s services were deemed to be no longer required.
One senior director argued that it would be ‘wrong’ to make the man redun-
dant given his deep loyalty and long-standing commitment to the company,
together with the economically significant contributions he had made in the
past. Another director, however, said it would be wrong to continue to give
him what he called a ‘dummy’ job—an internal consultancy role which, in
effect, added practically nothing to the effectiveness of the design function.
This, it was argued, was morally dubious because it meant patronizing the
individual and denying him the sort of satisfaction he would gain from doing
‘a real job’. The decision was referred to the divisional HR manager with whom
I was working.
Either solution to the problem of the ageing designer, we saw, could
be defended as morally correct and each, equally, could be condemned as
morally wrong. After considerable discussion, it was suggested, and eventually
accepted, that the man be made a personal and highly confidential offer of
a financial settlement that ‘would reflect his outstanding contribution to the
company’ if he chose to resign from the business. And how was this justified?
It was justified primarily on the grounds that the trend in the business was
towards much tighter cost controls on the personnel front and that to keep
the man in employment (distracting others from their main tasks, we were
informed by a local personnel officer) would only delay the ‘correct business
decision’ to bring about the departure of this employee. But does this mean
that we, as HR managers, were ignoring moral issues which go beyond con-
cerns of business expedience? Indeed not, we were taking into account the
variety of competing value positions. And—rather importantly as far as I and