Moral gray zones enable both managers and workers to perform their roles
What do software engineers, flight attendants, factory workers, mail carriers, truck drivers, and hospital nurses have in common? According to HBS professor Michel Anteby, these professions—and many others just as dissimilar, maybe even yours—inform a "moral gray zone" that allows discreet but regular ways for staff and supervisors to engage in officially forbidden yet tolerated practices at work.
"Gray zones emerge when official company rules are repeatedly broken with, at minimum, a supervisor's tacit or explicit approval," says Anteby.
In the case of software engineers, the quiet rule-breaking could mean developing code with management's approval for open-source external company projects. For mail carriers, the moral gray zone might mean finishing duties early yet staying "on the clock" until the workday has officially ended. In both cases, managers are usually aware of these activities yet turn a blind eye, says Anteby. Why? Is that because such managers are nice people? Or do supervisors see hidden yet important benefits in a company culture that tacitly encourages—and nourishes—gray zones?
Anteby's recent book, Moral Gray Zones: Side Productions, Identity, and Regulation in an Aeronautic Plant (Princeton University Press), looks at how craftsmen establish and fulfill professional identity while simultaneously skirting rules against the creation of personal artifacts on company time and with company materials.
While such settings may become less common as manufacturing loses influence, in the following email Q&A Michel Anteby explains that moral gray zones operate everywhere, at all levels of organizations. What's more, they will probably remain strong in the years to come. "To date, I have not found a single person unable to articulate in his or her work context a moral gray zone," says Anteby. What does your office do to sustain one?
Martha Lagace: How prevalent are gray zones?
Michel Anteby: Very prevalent, but not all gray zones are moral. Following sociologist Emile Durkheim's use of morality, moral practices are defined as those deemed acceptable by a given society or group. The moral labeling is therefore a collective process. A worker and a supervisor cannot together deem a practice moral; instead a larger collective needs to agree to the label.
Consider, for instance, an employee stealing repeatedly—with his manager's approval—from the cash register. That practice is a gray zone, but would hardly qualify as a moral one. By contrast, the same employee setting aside a clothing item in a storage room to later purchase for himself when the item will be deeply discounted is a gray zone as well. In high-end department stores such practices are often tolerated. This leniency when moderately exhibited is widely seen as "good" practice, a small favor done to reward deserving employees, and as such qualifies as a moral gray zone.
Quantifying moral gray zones is a difficult exercise. Identifying them, first, requires in-depth knowledge of a given work setting. Quantifying them, next, requires multiple managers and employees answering questions that could get them fired if the company decided to apply its rules to the letter.
This is why ethnographic approaches are best suited to document such practices. Ethnographers spend extended periods of time in the field and therefore see or are told by informants what others might miss. At the same time, a limitation is that we cannot quantify what we observe.
However, to date I have not found a single person unable to articulate in his or her work context a moral gray zone. Harvard Business School students constantly share with me their stories of moral gray zones and update me on current practices. Recently, for instance, I was surprised to learn that a student who worked in the U.S. pulp industry was asked by his co-workers to punch them out later than they actually finished work. Management apparently was aware of this practice and allowed it: a prime example, I suspect, of a moral gray zone.
Q: Using the example of paramedics, how do gray zones operate and why are they significant?
A: Occupations, de facto, provide the shared, collective level of understanding that allows moral gray zones to exist. Nurses, paramedics, or flight attendants, for instance, share common training, practices, and social identities that place them in a readily available collective.
Paramedics are a telling example given the costly implications of malpractice in the United States. Paramedics are supposed to bring patients to attending physicians (most often in emergency rooms) and are not supposed to perform many medical acts. Officially, attending physicians are the ones performing the acts. Yet in some instances, to save "crashing patients" (meaning patients who seem about to die), paramedics will perform acts that they are not officially allowed to perform. Not all paramedics, however, are given such leeway—only the trusted ones. When physicians are aware of these breaches, yet remain silent, we are in the midst of a moral gray zone.
Two broader implications can be drawn from this example. First, leniencies are part of the managerial toolkit. They allow for "local regulation": in other words, they allow work to be done. Second, by allowing trusted paramedics to "save lives" even if this means bending the rules a bit, physicians cater to the paramedics' occupational identities. Paramedics become who they aspire to be, namely "saviors." These paramedics are also more likely to cooperate with the physicians in the future. Thus, moral gray zones enable both managers and workers to perform their roles.
This article was provided with permission from Harvard Business School Working Knowledge.