Documente Academic
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Documente Cultură
Professionals
HBSWK Pub. Date: Jul 5, 2004
What influences the moral compasses of young professionals? Harvard
Graduate School of Education researchers discuss their new book on
ethical conflicts faced by generations at the start of their career ladder.
by Mallory Stark
Market pressures and the speed of modern-day business are placing severe
ethical demands on young professionals. Are they selling out to further their
careers, or doing the right thing by their moral compass?
The picture is complicated, and has been recently documented via the
Harvard Graduate School of Education's GoodWork Project. A recent book on
the research, Making Good: How Young People Cope with Moral Dilemmas
at Work (Harvard University Press, 2004), was written by researchers Wendy
Fischman, Becca Solomon, Deborah Greenspan, and faculty member
Howard Gardner (renowned for his theory of multiple intelligences). The study
looked at on-the-job moral dilemmas faced by a hundred professionals
between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five in three professions: journalism,
science, and acting.
The results are unsettling. Often the young professionals know the right thing
to do, but instead cross that line to further their careers by bending the rules
or engaging in morally questionable behavior. They look for jobs with big
money instead of big satisfaction.
Employers need to consider these findings as they think about their own
corporate values and as they construct management development and
mentoring programs.
Mallory Stark: Is this tension over the dual meaning of being a "good
worker"—that is, being skilled at a job as well as doing the job in an
ethical manner—inherent to the younger generation of workers?
This is not to say that financial concerns have not always had some role in
professions—scientists have always competed for grants, for example. But
the market pressures of today combined with the lightning speed advances in
technology are unprecedented. Young workers are developing in a different
cultural climate than their predecessors, and have the complex task of
learning to negotiate the often competing demands of excellence, ethics, and
earnings.
While young actors looked to distant luminaries as models in their work, they
were more likely to depend upon themselves and to look to their immediate
theater community than to cite individual mentors.
Overall, we were concerned that very few participants in our study described
mentors who exemplified "good work."
Mission: Define and articulate the mission of your particular profession and
whether the institution in which you work and the colleagues with whom you
work carry out work that is in accordance with this mission.
Mirror: Reflect on the decisions you make and approaches you take by
asking yourself two questions: Am I proud of the kind of worker I am? Would I
want to live in a society in which every member of my profession carried out
work in the ways it is currently executed? Responding to these questions
regularly can keep professionals honest and may offer opportunities to correct
a misguided action or decision.
It is also important for young people who have career interests, but not a
particular job, to also consider the consequences their work has on others
and the impact that "good work," as well as compromised or bad work, has on
our society. Towards this end, we are currently in the process of developing a
curriculum for high school students to bridge the gap between research and
practice and to prepare young students for the kind of pressures and
challenges they will undoubtedly face in the workplace. This curriculum, A
Toolkit for Workers in Progress, aims to introduce the concept of "good work"
so that they have a framework to use as they consider the kind of workers
they are now and the kinds of professionals they want to become.
Prevalence and impact of ethical dilemmas for young people. Almost all
the young professionals we interviewed dealt with some kind of ethical
dilemma in their work. These ethical dilemmas played out differently
depending on age, profession, workplace settings, personality, and available
support structures, but the tensions often caused individuals to act in ways
that conflicted with the values and intentions they espoused for their work.
Even though young professionals described values such as honesty, integrity,
and professional relationships as important to them, they were willing to
compromise these values in order to satisfy a professional demand, compete
with their peers for recognition, or gain rewards for their long hours and low
pay. Young professionals just starting out in their careers felt that there was
no choice—if they were going to stay in their jobs, or even get a job, they may
have to cheat just to "keep up" and "make it" in the field.
Particularly dangerous for young people, we've noticed, is that market forces
not only influence the ways in which young people think about and carry out
their work, but also in what career they choose to pursue. Actors were
concerned about the decreasing theater venues (and the "Disneyfication" of
live theater) and some of the journalists contemplated leaving the profession
altogether.