Does It Make Sense to Be a Loyal Employee?

Juan M. Elegido

Received: 8 February 2012 / Accepted: 4 September 2012 / Published online: 13 September 2012

� Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012

Abstract Loyalty is a much-discussed topic among

business ethicists, but this discussion seems to have issued

in very few clear conclusions. This article builds on the

existing literature on the subject and attempts to ground a

definite conclusion on a limited topic: whether, and under

what conditions, it makes sense for an employee to offer

loyalty to his employer. The main ways in which loyalty to

one’s employer can contribute to human flourishing are

that it makes the employee more trustworthy and therefore

more valuable as an employee; makes it easier to form

authentic relationships in other areas of the employee’s

life; expands the employee’s field of interests and gives her

or him a richer identity; provides greater motivation for the

employee’s work; makes it possible to have a greater unity

in the employee’s life; improves the performance of the

organization for which the employee works; contributes to

the protection of valuable social institutions; and, in so far

as many employees share an attitude of loyalty towards the

organization which employs them, it becomes possible for

this organization to become a true community. Last, but not

the least, loyal relationships have an inherent value. The

article also reviews the main arguments that have been

offered against employee loyalty and concludes that none

of them offers a reason why it would be inappropriate in all

cases for an employee to be loyal to her or his employer.

The force of these arguments depends on the specific

attributes of the organization for which the employee

works. The main conclusion of the article is that while

being a loyal employee involves risk, it has the potential to

contribute significantly to the employee’s fulfilment. The

main challenge for employees is to identify employers who

are worthy of being loyal to.

Keywords Loyalty � Meaning in work � Implied

employment contract � Employee commitment �Community

Introduction

It has become commonplace that the old implied employ-

ment contract under which employers offered employment

for life in return for the employees’ undivided attention and

devotion is dead (Anderson and Schalk 1998; Cappelli

2005; Dunford 1999; Hallock 2009). Supposedly, modern

economic conditions put a premium on employer flexibility

and employee mobility and have rendered that implied

contract unviable. However, serious questions have been

raised on how prevalent that supposed implied employment

contract ever was, at least in the Western world (Hall and

Moss 1998), on the extent to which the old contract is gone

(Jacoby 1999), and on the economic advantages of the free-

agent model (Hallock 2009). However that may be, my

own experience and that of other academics who teach in

programmes addressed to management practitioners is that

many young managers do not think of their relationship to

their current or future employers in terms of loyalty. Much

of the motivation for my writing this article stems from my

belief that these young managers are missing something

potentially important for their lives when they so casually

dismiss the possibility of a loyal relationship with their

employers.

Irrespective of the prevailing values in the world of

practice, the issue of loyalty is very much alive in business

J. M. Elegido (&)

Lagos Business School, Pan-African University, 2, Ahmed

Onibudo Street, Victoria Island, Lagos, Nigeria

e-mail: jelegido@pau.edu.ng

123

J Bus Ethics (2013) 116:495–511

DOI 10.1007/s10551-012-1482-4

ethics journals and books. The appropriateness or other-

wise of giving or expecting loyalty in modern corporations

is kept being discussed, as the many references provided in

this article attest. However, no clear conclusion seems to

emerge from the recent studies on loyalty. Thus, among the

more prominent articles on the subject, Baron (1991),

Carbone (1997) and Duska (1997a) firmly reject the

appropriateness of loyalty for employees, Hajdin (2005)

does so for a large number of cases and Pfeiffer denies that

employees have a duty of loyalty, excepting only cases in

which such a duty may derive from an explicit pledge or

the creation of expectations. On the other side, Schrag

(2001), Corvino (2002) and Mele (2001) defend the

appropriateness of loyalty to employers. Randels (2001)

and Ewin (1993) offer qualified endorsements; for Randels

loyalty to one’s employer is only appropriate where the

employer is a community and for Ewin where the employer

has socially beneficial goals.

Perhaps that lack of clear conclusions derives from the

fact that the contemporary academic discussion of loyalty

addresses many different issues. Among others: How

should loyalty be defined? Do employers have a moral duty

to be loyal to their employees? Does the manager’s loyalty

to her or his subordinates clash with her or his fiduciary

duties? Do employees have a moral duty to be loyal to their

employers? If this duty exists, does it clash with other

duties (i.e., that of blowing the whistle in appropriate

occasions)? In which ways and within what limits should

loyalty towards employers be manifested?

To increase the chances of making progress in the

investigation of loyalty in work settings, I will focus as

sharply as possible the discussion and will confine myself

to studying whether, and under what conditions, from the

point of view of the employee’s fulfilment, it is advisable

that he offer loyalty to his employer. I will not even pause

to ask whether employees have a moral duty to show

loyalty to their employers.

The employee fulfilment to which I refer in this article

should not be understood as being better off in purely

financial or hedonic terms. Throughout the article, I have in

mind an inclusive conception of human flourishing

according to which a person has lived a fulfilling life if at

the end it is possible to make an overall judgement that that

life was a good life, even if many particular aims of that

person were frustrated or had to be sacrificed, either

because of unfavourable circumstances or to attain more

important goals. Of course, there are many conceptions of

what is a good life, but in the context of this article, I wish

to leave this question as open as possible as the thesis I

defend here is compatible with many of them. Broadly

speaking, it should be possible to accommodate the theses I

uphold in this article within many types of preference-

satisfaction and objective-list conceptions of a good life.

The point of departure of many academic discussions of

this topic is the ordinary meaning of the term loyalty. This

has hampered the emergence of shared views as the term

loyalty can be defined in many different, though related,

ways and none of these is specially geared to making it

easier to arrive at definite conclusions in a process of moral

reasoning. To avoid these problems I will try to be very

clear about the concept of loyalty I use and, though I will

endeavour not to stray too far from common usage in

stipulating my use of the term, the main consideration I

will have in mind in fashioning my definition is to arrive at

a definition of loyalty that is suitable for the purpose of

moral argument and takes into account the lessons of past

discussions of professional loyalty.

So, my plan is to start by putting forward a clear defi-

nition of loyalty. Then, I will investigate whether, and

under what circumstances, it makes sense for an employee

to offer loyalty (in the sense defined) to her or his employer

by exploring in detail the arguments that can be offered in

favour of, and against, the thesis that professional loyalty is

conducive to an employee’s fulfilment.

A Definition of Employee’s Loyalty

For my purposes in this article, I wish to stipulate that

when I use the term loyalty, I will be referring to:

A deliberate commitment to further the best interests

of one’s employer, even when doing so may demand

sacrificing some aspects of one’s self-interest beyond

what would be required by one’s legal and other

moral duties.

I do not put forward this definition because I think it

corresponds better than other alternative definitions which

could be offered to the way the term ‘loyalty’ is commonly

used. While this definition is not purely idiosyncratic, the

main reason I offer it is that, at least under some circum-

stances, acting in that way towards their employers is likely

to make employees better off. I have crafted this definition

with an eye to staking out a defensible moral position in the

tradition of virtue ethics represented by philosophers like

Aristotle, Aquinas and MacIntyre.

I will now discuss the main elements of the definition I

have offered.

This definition describes loyalty as a deliberate com-

mitment. By choosing this characterization, I am dissoci-

ating myself from an understanding of loyalty that sees it as

a sentiment, feeling, emotion or passion. I do not claim that

using the term loyalty when one is referring primarily to an

emotional attachment, as authors like Ewin (1993), Randels

(2001) and Hajdin (2005) have done, is wrong as a matter of

using correctly the English language. My main reason in not

496 J. M. Elegido

123

following them is that I consider that the discussion of the

emotion of loyalty (as variously defined by different writ-

ers) has yielded meagre and unreliable (from the point of

view of justifying practical directives) results. In my view,

the relative failure of this line of investigation is not sur-

prising. It is well understood that from a feeling, as such and

taken in itself, no moral conclusions follow; and also that it

is notoriously difficult to prescribe feelings. On the other

hand, in focusing on loyalty as something deliberately

chosen I follow many other well-respected authors such as

Royce (1908), Mele (2001), Vandekerckhove and Commers

(2004), Gonzalez and Guillen (2008) and Kleinig (2008).

I want to make it, however, clear that by defining loyalty

as a deliberate commitment, I am not trying to suggest that

loyalty is, or should be, detached from emotion. As a

matter of fact, the deliberate commitment will often be

motivated by feelings of attachment (Organ and Ryan

1995). In other cases, what started as a deliberate choice

will eventually produce those feelings of attachment

(Burris et al. 2008). Most commonly, the deliberate com-

mitment and the feelings of attachment will have grown in

parallel and, as I will discuss below, this fact provides a

reason why the deliberate commitment is worth making.

My definition also makes reference to the fact that

loyalty may demand sacrificing some aspects of one’s self-

interest. The connection between loyalty and the willing-

ness to make sacrifices for the person, group or cause to

which one is loyal has been noted often (Duska 1997a;

Ewin 1993; Michalos 1981; Oldenquist 1982; Pfeiffer

1992; Schrag 2001).

For loyalty as I define it to exist, the loyal subject does

not have to be willing to sacrifice everything for the

employer to which one is loyal; the readiness to sacrifice

some aspects of one’s self-interest will suffice. In making

this point, I am trying to distance myself from authors like

Royce (1908, pp. 16–17) who states that ‘[l]oyalty shall

mean… the thoroughgoing devotion of a person to a

cause’, and Ladd (1967, p. 97), who defines loyalty as a

‘wholehearted devotion to an object of some kind’. It is a

false dichotomy to assume that if my employer is not the

centre of my life I can only relate to her or him in a purely

arms-length and instrumental basis. Loyalty is better

understood as a continuum than as a binary phenomenon;

accordingly, in my definition, loyalty to an employer is not

necessarily a matter of all or nothing but admits of degrees,

of more and less, and the fact that it is not wholehearted

does not imply that it does not exist at all. Thus understood,

it should also be noted that loyalty does not have to be

exclusive as could be the case if I had defined it in a more

totalizing way. It is possible for a person to have several

loyalties simultaneously. This aspect of my definition of

loyalty is shared by Oldenquist (1982), Ewin (1993) and

Provis (2005). Again, it should also be noted that, because

of the relative modesty of the definition of loyalty I offer,

no presumption arises that, as defined by me, loyalty has to

be uncritical.

The definition refers to furthering the best interests of

one’s employer. The employer does not necessarily have to

be a business organization, and this marks an important

difference between this article and many other academic

discussions of loyalty in the workplace such as those of Ewin

(1993), Haughey (1993), Mele (2001) Corvino (2002), and

Hajdin (2005), among many others. The employer could be a

university, an NGO, a research institute, a government

department or agency, a health organization, or a church. It

has great interest for my discussion that many young people

nowadays are opting to work for such employers rather than

for business organizations, often at a significant financial

cost to themselves, for reasons connected to the issue I dis-

cuss in this article (Perry 1997; Brewer et al. 2000). It is also

important to notice that while, as we will see below, the great

majority of arguments against employee loyalty are based on

developments in the business world; in practice they have

induced a general mistrust against the idea of loyalty to

employers of all types. By bringing other types of employers

explicitly into my discussion of this issue I hope to be able to

assess openly all relevant considerations.

The definition refers to the employer’s interests. These

interests can be furthered in many ways, and it is important

to stress that being loyal to one’s employer is not just a

question of persisting in that employment relationship for a

very long time. One can express one’s loyalty in other ways

such as avoiding gossip, mentoring younger employees,

going the extra mile with a customer, taking pains with

one’s work, and being ready to work overtime even when

that is not personally convenient, among many others (Hart

and Thompson 2007). We can even talk, as Alvesson (2000)

has suggested, of post-exit loyalty when a former employee

maintains a readiness to foster the interest of a former

employer after the employment connection has been ter-

minated. Also, the mere fact of persisting in one’s

employment for a long time will not necessarily express

loyalty in terms of my definition as it may not result from a

willingness to further one’s employer’s interests, but may

instead be the result of purely self-regarding considerations.

It is well known that in most countries the economy

nowadays is much more dynamic than it was some decades

ago: companies are born and die more frequently and leading

companies lose their leadership positions faster (Clancy

1998). It is a necessary consequence of this fact that

employees will have to change employment more frequently

and therefore to promise a life-long employment relationship

may well be a very rash action. But this in no way shows that

other aspects of employee loyalty make no sense any longer.

In this article, I assume that an employee’s commitment to

the interests of the employer will often most naturally be

Does It Make Sense to Be a Loyal Employee? 497

123

expressed in a readiness to persist in the employment rela-

tionship for the long term. But how long this relationship will

last, and even whether this way of expressing loyalty is

appropriate, will to a great extent depend on many circum-

stantial factors and especially more so on the other com-

mitments of the employee (for very good reasons, loyalty to

their employers will not be the only loyalty, nor the most

important one, for most employees (Axinn 1994; Haughey

1993) and the characteristics of the employer. At any rate,

even if a long-term relationship is not appropriate in a given

case, it by no means follows that other ways of expressing the

employee’s commitment will also be inappropriate.

The definition I have put forward refers to a commit-

ment to further the employer’s best interests, not her or his

every want. Others before me have argued for such an

understanding of loyalty (Boatright 2003; Larmer 1992;

Michalos 1981; Stieb 2006).

My definition also refers to sacrificing one’s interests

beyond what would be required by one’s legal and other

moral duties. I take it for granted in this article that there are

very good reasons for employees to comply not only with

all the legal duties which attach to their position as

employees (among which is the legal duty of loyalty, that is

to say, the legal duty to act solely for the benefit of the

employer when engaging in any conduct that relates to the

employment), but also with any general moral duties such

as those which may result from previous (though perhaps

not legally enforceable) promises or from the fact of the

employee being given significant decision powers in the

understanding that they will be exercised to foster the

interests of the employer. It would be a false dichotomy to

assume that the only alternative to an employee being loyal

(in the sense of my definition) is for her or him to be dis-

loyal. It is possible not to be loyal without being disloyal or

in any other way unethical (Ewin 1993; Schrag 2001). As

Pfeiffer (1992, p. 536) has observed: ‘One may be described

or viewed as a valued employee at the same time one is not

properly a loyal one (sic). One can do one’s job well, be

respected and valued by one’s employer, yet plainly lack

any particular allegiance to the employer. One might

explain that one is looking for a better job, is happy to have

this one for now, and will work honestly and well until the

better one arrives. An employer may accept this explana-

tion, not branding the employee as the least bit disloyal.’

What I am trying to investigate in this article is whether

there are good reasons for employees to go voluntarily

beyond the demands of this legal and moral baseline.

Finally, in view of the contrary position of a good

number of authors (De George 1993; Duska 1997a; Hart

and Thompson 2007; Hartman 1996; Reichheld 1996;

Solomon 1997; Vandekerckhove and Commers 2004), it

will be useful to point out that my definition does not

require that loyalty be reciprocal. Even though I have

explicitly introduced my own definition as a stipulative one

and therefore, strictly speaking, it needs no defence but only

consistency in my use of it, as so many, and so competent,

writers have taken a line different from mine, it may be

useful if I try to account for my own approach. In the first

place, I have tried to avoid being idiosyncratic. Cases like

the mother who persists in being loyally committed to her

disloyal son show that common usage does not insist on

reciprocity as a requirement of loyalty. Also, several moral

philosophers (Hajdin 2005; Larmer 1992; Randels 2001;

Stieb 2006) have adopted definitions of loyalty which do not

require an element of reciprocity. Finally, it may be useful

to note that several of the philosophers who include reci-

procity in their treatment of loyalty are well-known Aris-

totelians who probably have in mind the paradigmatic case

of loyalty between friends. Aristotle famously taught that

mutuality is a requirement of friendship (Nicomachean

Ethics VIII and IX). For my own purpose of studying the

attitudes appropriate to an employee who is seeking fulfil-

ment in his work, importing into my discussion the stronger

requirements of friendship in its focal instances makes little

sense.

Arguments for Loyalty to One’s Employer

A committed and loyal relationship between employee and

employer has been seen as a desirable arrangement by

many people. Even if, as it has been widely reported, many

employers and employees no longer see it as practicable, or

even desirable, in current circumstances, it will be useful to

try and start by understanding its potential benefits. I will

pay no attention here to the likely advantages to the

employer from that type of relationship (except insofar as

they may result in benefits for the employee), as doing so

would lead me beyond the scope of this article. I will

concentrate instead on examining the arguments which can

be offered in defence of the position that for an employee

to offer loyalty—as defined above—to her or his employer

might indeed be conducive to making for herself or himself

the best life she or he possibly can.

At this stage it may be useful to repeat that it is not my

purpose to argue that employees generally have a duty of

loyalty to their employers. My aim in this article is just to

show that it may well be in the interests of the employees

themselves to be loyal, in the sense that adopting this

attitude towards their employers may help them to live a

more fulfilling life.

Loyalty and Human Flourishing

As the main point of this article is that being loyal as an

employee can be conducive to human flourishing, it may

498 J. M. Elegido

123

be useful to clarify the relationship between loyalty and

human flourishing.

Loyalty, along the lines I defined it above is a form of

commitment, and for my purposes here can be best

understood as an aspect of friendship. A useful approach to

this matter can be found in the interpretation that the

Oxford philosopher John Finnis offers of the teaching of

Aristotle on friendship. As Finnis understands this, the core

of a relationship of friendship is that two parties ‘are in

such a relationship to each other that each wants the other

to be better off, and find some satisfaction or even joy in

the other’s … success.’ (Finnis 2011a, p. 99; a more

detailed treatment can be found in Finnis 2011c,

pp. 141–44). Like Aristotle, Finnis considers that the cen-

tral case of friendship is that in which each friend is

identified with the other on account of the other being a

lovable person.

For Aristotle, friendship is an important aspect of

human flourishing and he says things such as: ‘a good

friend is by nature desirable for a good man,’ ‘[friendship]

is necessary for living,’ ‘the happy man needs friends,

‘[n]obody would choose to live without friends even if he

had all the other good things’ and ‘friends are considered

to be the greatest of external goods’ (Nicomachean Ethics

VIII, i and IX, ix).

In several of his writings, Finnis has offered a detailed

study of the different aspects of human flourishing. He has

endeavoured to offer complete lists of these aspects (Finnis

2011c, pp. 90–92). There has been an evolution in Finnis’

thought and there are differences between the different lists

he has put forward, but the category of friendship has found

a place in all of them. Without entering here into the details

of Finnis’ position, he says of friendship, as defined above,

that ‘this sort of state of things between us is really better

than the state of things which obtains when each is coldly

indifferent to the other’s … success or failure…’ (Finnis

2011a, p. 99) and that we come to see this early in life by

an act of underived insight after we have had some expe-

rience of human relationships. The core of that insight is

that relationships of friendship are (i) possible and (ii) an

advantage—a desirable beneficial possibility, something to

be pursued, not only for their utility as a means to satis-

fying other desires, but as something good in itself that is

constitutive of the fulfilment of a person (cf. the more

detailed analysis of insight into the goodness of knowledge

that Finnis offers in Finnis 2011a, pp. 89–90). Studying in

detail Finnis’ understanding of the aspects of human fulf-

ilment and his explanation of how we come to know that

they are indeed fulfilling and not merely what some people

happen to desire, would take us too far from the topic of

this article. For my present purposes, it is enough to notice

that Finnis argues that being involved in relations of

friendship in its various forms, from the most intense to the

most diluted, is not merely something conducive to human

flourishing, but an aspect of that flourishing.1

Beyond the assertions and arguments of Aristotle and

Finnis, I would also like to point out that very few people

would like to have to deny the value of friendship; more-

over, even though it is possible for somebody to deny it

verbally, that person will be unable to avoid inconsistency

for he or she will act in many ways which are only

explicable on the basis of an implicit acceptance of that

value of friendship which he or she denies.

A possible difficulty in approaching loyalty to one’s

employer as a form of friendship is that Aristotle himself,

near the beginning of his treatment of friendship (Nicho-

machean Ethics VIII, (iii), distinguishes three varieties or

species of friendship: friendship of goodness, friendship of

pleasure and friendship of utility, and he explicitly states

that only the first class is ‘true friendship’ (VIII, vi), perfect

of its kind, while the last two are ‘secondary forms of

friendship’ (VIII, vi), ‘are grounded on an inessential fac-

tor’ (VIII, iii), are ‘of a less genuine kind’ (VIII, iv) and can

easily be dissolved (VIII, iii). Should we conclude from this

that a relationship with one’s employer can at best become

one of these inferior types of friendship and that, though

perhaps it may be useful for some purposes, it cannot pos-

sibly be an aspect of true human flourishing? This conclu-

sion would most likely not be justified even in respect of

Aristotle. In his discussion of friendship, he makes refer-

ence to many other types of friendship that, while they are

not instances of the focal case of friendship between two

mature good men, are not either instances of any of the two

secondary forms of friendship (pleasure and utility) which

he specifically identifies. Examples are the ‘mutual friend-

liness between members … of the human species’ (VIII, i);

friendship among the members of a community (VIII, i and

ix) or the citizens of a state (IX, vi), between parents and

their children (VIII, i), brothers (VIII, ix), and husband and

wife (VIII, vii), among those serving on the same ship or in

the same force (VIII, ix) or among members of the same

social club (VIII, xi). All these cases of friendship can be

best thought of as derivative instances of the concept

(because—in Aristotle’s view—they do not instantiate to

the full all the traits of the central case) but are still good and

valuable as they exhibit some of these traits.

Probably a better way of thinking of the wide variety of

cases that share a certain ‘family resemblance’ with the

central case of friendship, and which fail to exhibit to the

full its valuable traits, but do not have any traits that are

1 Few well-known philosophers have undertaken to identify the main

aspects of human flourishing and they have not necessarily used that

term to characterize the objective of their efforts. It is interesting to

note that among the few who are known to me to have worked on this

issue both Moore (1993) and Frankena (1973) coincide in concluding

that friendship is intrinsically good.

Does It Make Sense to Be a Loyal Employee? 499

123

negative in themselves, is to consider friendship, as Finnis

does, within the wider matrix of ‘harmony’. Finnis con-

siders several types of harmonious relations including

harmony within oneself (‘between one’s feelings and one’s

judgments [inner integrity], and between one’s judgments

and one’s behaviour [authenticity] [Finnis 2011b, p. 244

n.]), ‘harmony between persons in its various forms and

strengths’ (Finnis 2011b, p. 244 n.) and ‘harmony with the

widest reaches and most ultimate source of all reality,

including meaning and value’ (Finnis 2011b, p. 244 n).

There are many types of harmony between persons rang-

ing, in the number of people they include, from the love

between two lovers to the possible harmony among all

human beings, through—to refer only to instances to which

Finnis refers in his writings—harmony among fellow citi-

zens, neighbours, family members, people sharing the same

workplace or the same city. Finnis himself refers most

generally to ‘the range of forms of human community/

society/friendship’ (Finnis 2011c, p. 135) and explicitly

makes this whole range the subject matter of his own study.

These cases differ widely in the intensity of the relation-

ship, and the importance of its subject matter, but we can

find in all of them a certain form of harmony which we

understand is valuable and attractive. This value and

attractiveness can be made clearer by pointing at its simi-

larities with the focal case of this family of relationships in

Aristotle’s view: the friendship between two good people.

I hope these summary comments go some way towards

clarifying both how the relationship among the members of

a large body can display this type of valuable harmony, and

that that harmony is indeed a form of friendship whose

intrinsic value, as illuminated by the consideration of more

focal cases of friendship, derives from the members of that

body sharing in common goals and being committed to the

well-being of the other members, though perhaps without

the intensity and even exclusivity that is typical of the

central cases of friendship.

Up to this point in this subsection of this article, I have

not referred to loyalty. I still have to show how loyalty itself

may be an aspect of human flourishing. Here again Aristotle

can be a good guide. In his treatment of friendship, he

observes that friendship will be more perfect ‘on account of

the time it lasts’ (Nicomachean Ethics VIII, iv) or better, in

view of his whole argument (in VIII, iii and iv), on account

of its intrinsic capacity to be longer-lasting. He also says

that ‘it is probably the better course to visit friends in

misfortune readily, and without waiting to be invited, for it

is the part of a friend to do a kindness, particularly to those

who are in need, and have not asked for it’ (IX, xi).2 Along

the same lines, Finnis observes that ‘stability of relationship

is one of the greatest goods that I can bring my friend by

being his friend; to be a fair-weather friend is one of the

ways of not being a real friend but of merely seeming so’

(Finnis 2011a, p. 110). I will have more to say about this

later in this article, but for now I hope that I have at least

laid some basic groundwork for understanding how loyalty

is both an important disposition for preserving friendship

and indeed an important aspect of the more valuable types

of friendship; it is in that way that loyal relationships can be

themselves aspects of human flourishing.

Most philosophers who have examined the issue, rep-

resenting different schools of thought, converge on the

conclusion that, generally speaking, loyalty is indeed a

good thing as it makes possible forms of human flourishing

that could not obtain otherwise (Hare 1981; Oldenquist

1982; Sandel 2009; Williams 1981). Kleinig (2008, p. 4.

See also Ladd 1967) concludes a survey of recent philo-

sophical work on loyalty by stating that ‘[w]hat is almost

certainly arguable is that a person who is completely

devoid of loyalties would be deficient as a person under-

stood inter alia as a moral agent’. To have loyalties means

to have a stable identity which is defined by them and a

narrative structure in one’s life. Not to have loyalties

means to live from one preference to the next, from one

fleeting moment to another. And, moving down from the

rarefied heights of academic philosophy to the world of

ordinary people, perhaps nothing makes so clear how

widely loyalty is valued and how much many individuals

crave it as an observation of the strong attachment of

countless people to different sports clubs.

This subsection has been devoted to the task of clari-

fying how, even in the context of non-intimate relation-

ships, loyalty can contribute in important ways to human

flourishing. Indeed, this is something that few deny, and I

take this position for granted in the rest of this article. The

point that is not clear to many people, which many actually

deny, and which I study in this article, is whether loyalty to

one’s employer can be a form of this fulfilling loyalty.

Loyal Employees Tend to Have Greater Motivation

Having a higher motivation to work matters in many ways,

not only because high performance at work is an important

contributor to psychological well-being (Robertson and

Cooper 2011), but also, and importantly, because working

well is in itself an intrinsic aspect of human fulfilment

(Alkire 2000, 2005; Finnis 1992, 2011c); accordingly,

anything that facilitates our working well, provided that

2 Aristotle also makes points similar to those set out in this section,

though generally in a less elaborate form, in his Eudemian Ethics.

Among the issues he treats are the value of friendship (Eudemian

Footnote 2 continued

Ethics VII, i, xi and xii), the various forms of friendship (VII, i and x)

and loyalty in friendship (VII, i and v).

500 J. M. Elegido

123

that work is ethically sound, facilitates our overall human

flourishing.

Loyalty towards her or his employer can increase an

employee’s motivation to work in two main ways. In the

first place, the fact that our moods and emotions change

frequently and quickly means that without stabilizers like

loyalty, we are unlikely to sustain effort and dedication and

therefore unlikely to attain objectives which are inherently

difficult and call for sustained dedication in the face of

obstacles, as is often the case with professional objectives,

especially ambitious ones.

Second, all things being equal, working in what is our

own is more motivating than merely doing what we have

undertaken to do in exchange for some pay. Our work is

likely to be more interesting and stimulating if it is devoted

to furthering a project we see as our own than if we see

ourselves as having rented out part of our time for it to be

devoted to the advancement of somebody else’s aims.

Of course, a purely instrumental approach to work can

be avoided also in other ways, such as by being committed

to one’s profession. Thus, many academics have a strong

commitment to their academic field and a much more

tenuous one to the institution in which they happen to

work. Still, in many cases, one commitment does not have

to exclude the other and, for many people, unlike for

academics, a strong loyalty to their field of work is not a

very realistic option. Other things being equal, identifica-

tion with the organizations which employ them will

increase the work motivation of most people (Bakker and

Schaufeli 2008; Demerouti and Cropanzano 2011; Rosanas

and Velilla 2003; Yoon et al. 1994).

Loyal Employees are More Trustworthy

A loyal employee is inherently more trustworthy and, as

Frank (1988) has argued, trustworthiness is not something

that remains locked up in a person’s mind and is inacces-

sible to observation by others. Very much on the contrary,

while trustworthiness, like other aspects of one’s character,

can be faked, it is not a foregone conclusion that others will

be systematically deceived by a false facade. Many of us

are not good actors, and many signs of trustworthiness are

observable even after a very short acquaintance and espe-

cially so if the acquaintance lasts longer. Thus, by and

large, the actual degree of trustworthiness of somebody is

more often than not perceived by others and that makes

loyal employees more attractive to employers than disloyal

ones. In so far as this is the case, this provides a reason to

develop the character of a loyal employee, for the chances

are that just faking such a character will not work as well

for this purpose as actually having it.

This point should not be misunderstood. I am not

arguing that being attractive to employers is an intrinsically

valuable aspect of human flourishing or that failing to be

attractive to them makes human flourishing impossible.

Living a good life depends crucially on the soundness of

the ultimate aims one pursues and on developing the right

character and the right relationships with others. Still, as

Aristotle argued, even ‘goods of fortune’ also play a role,

even if it is a subordinate one, in living a good life and,

especially in the case of a professional person, this in a

large measure includes professional success.

I am not even recommending that employees be loyal to

their employers in order to become more attractive to them,

something which, far from helping them live a better life,

would be likely to erode their character and self-respect.

My argument is not similar to that of those who recom-

mend being ethical because it is the safer and surer way to

become successful and wealthy. It is more in the line of

those who recommend being ethical because it is the way

to live a good life, but still pause to remark that one should

not take it for granted that ethical principles are a short

route to destitution. While it is true that living ethically in

no way guarantees worldly success and good fortune, it is

also true, and worth repeating, that acting ethically is

intrinsically connected with, and certainly facilitates,

working well and creating value for one’s customers or

clients; it is also connected, though more contingently, with

doing well in one’s professional life. Similarly, being loyal

towards one’s employer, something for which, as we will

see, there are more fundamental reasons, is not necessarily,

as so many young people seem to believe, an obstacle to

career advancement; it can well be a factor in one’s pro-

fessional success. This is not the most important thing that

can be said for loyalty to one’s employer, among other

things because the connection between loyalty and pro-

fessional advancement is far from a sure thing, but it is still

worth saying.

Loyal Employees Improve the Performance

of the Organizations for Which They Work and in This

Way Benefit Themselves

The ways in which a work organization benefits from

having loyal employees have been well studied (Harter

et al. 2009; McCarthy 1997; Reichheld 1996). Organiza-

tions with loyal employees save on significant replacement

costs. An organization can more confidently delegate

authority to a loyal employee without fearing that the

authority will be misused in self-serving ways (Hambrick

and Jackson 2000; Vandekerckhove and Commers 2004),

and in the complex and fast-changing environments which

are characteristic nowadays, the ability to delegate

authority to employees who are closer to the action is

advantageous; conversely, a work organization that is not

able to delegate decision-making authority to employees

Does It Make Sense to Be a Loyal Employee? 501

123

lower in the hierarchy is hampered in its ability to react

fast and appropriately to changes in its environment. There

are other ways—highly beneficial to itself—in which an

organization can act with regards to loyal employees,

which are not available, at least to the same extent, in

relation to employees who are not loyal. Examples include

making significant investments in the training of employ-

ees (Hartman 1994; Schrag 2001) and disclosing to them

confidential information. Loyal employees who remain

long term with an organization are also essential for the

preservation of the organization’s institutional memory

(Reichheld 1996). Hirschman (1970, 1974) has argued that

organizational deficiencies can be corrected either by

‘voice’ (expressing dissatisfaction and making efforts to

improve things) or by ‘exit’ (leaving the organization when

its performance declines) and that loyalty delays exit and

encourages voice, which is more effective in improving

organizations. Finally, organizations are more effective

when loyal employees exhibit organizational citizenship

behaviour, that is to say, when they act in spontaneous and

innovative ways which go beyond role requirements

(Deckop et al. 1999), especially in the fast-expanding

service sector in which it is more difficult to directly

supervise employees (Herzenberg et al. 1998).

Having a single loyal employee is valuable, but the

organization which has a critical mass of such employees

enjoys a definite strategic advantage: such organization

will be able to act in ways which other organizations

working in the same field will find it difficult to imitate

(McCarthy 1997; Senge et al. 1999; Walton 1985; Watkins

2003; Wood 1996; Wood and Albanese 1995; Wood and

de Menezes 1998).

The whole argument set out in the two preceding

paragraphs by itself shows that having loyal employees is

very advantageous for the organizations which employ

them, but not immediately for the employees themselves.

However, in so far as working for a more successful

employer makes the employee better off, this is already an

employee benefit and, more significantly, in so far as

employees are loyal towards their employers and identify

with them, the distinction between the interests of the

employer and those of the employee blurs: if I identify with

the objectives of my employer and her or his goals (or at

least some of them) are treated as my own goals—the fact

that my employer is more successful in reaching her or his

goals makes me ipso facto more successful in reaching my

own goals.

Loyal Employees Make a Special Contribution

to the Wider Society

By being loyal employees also contribute to the general

good of the society, not only to the prosperity of their own

employers. Loyal employees make it easier for new orga-

nizations to grow and existing ones to survive in ways that

are favourable to the creation and preservation of social

capital (Hirschman 1970, 1974). In other words, when

employees are loyal, at least to a certain extent, to their

own employers, they protect valuable social institutions

that contribute to the satisfaction of human needs. As the

previous one, this argument is not directly an argument that

the employee is better off for being loyal. But so far as the

employees care not only for their own immediate interests,

but also for those of the wider society, they are better off by

the society being better off.

Loyalty at Work Makes It Easier to Have Committed

Relationships in Other Areas of the Employee’s Life

Fears have been expressed that a strong commitment by

employees to their jobs or their employers will make it

difficult for them to accommodate strong commitments in

other aspects of their lives (Korman et al. 1981; Randall

1987; Whyte 1956). However, research on employee

commitment has found a positive relationship between the

work and non-work attitudes of employees (Romzek 1985,

1989; Staines 1980). This is not surprising. A basic insight

of virtue ethics, which many who are not paid-up members

of this school of thought accept, is that our choices, espe-

cially important choices made repeatedly, shape our char-

acter. An employee who often chooses not to act loyally in

occasions when acting loyally could be appropriate is

shaping himself—pro tanto—as a person for whom loyalty

is not a valued trait of character. Therefore, acting without

loyalty in a significant area of our lives such as work will

tend to make it more difficult to be consistently loyal in

other spheres such as marriage, family or friendships. Of

course, less loyal marriages, families or friendships just

mean less strong marriages, families or friendships, as

loyalty in those relationships is constitutive of the rela-

tionships themselves.

Loyalty at Work Expands the Employee’s Field

of Interests to Additional Choice-Worthy Objectives

It has often been observed that loyalty is closely related

to—some, though not myself, argue that it is constituted

by—the phenomenon of identification with another (Klei-

nig 2008; Oldenquist 1982; Rosanas and Velilla 2003;

Schrag 2001; Stieb 2006). A father, for instance, identifies

with his son in the sense that he experiences his son’s

successes and failures as his own. In relation to the type of

loyalty which interests us here, it is possible for a person to

be identified with the organization for which he or she

works, to the point that he or she sees its successes and

failures as his or her own (Ewin 1993; Rousseau 1998;

502 J. M. Elegido

123

Stieb 2006). We have already said that if a person identifies

in this way with her or his employer, then the fact that an

organization benefits from having loyal employees

becomes itself a reason for an employee to be loyal. What I

want to add now is that having this type of identification

with my employer makes me better off.

I have defined loyalty as a deliberate commitment and

therefore loyalty itself, as I have defined it, is not identical

with identification. But being deliberately committed to an

organization identifies me progressively with it, and this

allows me to make my own Randels’ (2001, pp. 31–32)

observation that ‘[a]s loyalty develops, [the object of loy-

alty] becomes no longer strictly external, but is linked to

one’s self-identity and helps to provide meaning for one’s

life’. In so far as I act loyally towards my employer, I

progressively identify with her or him and thus expand the

universe of objects that matter to me; through this new

relationship I further define my identity (Fletcher 1993;

Ladd 1967; Oldenquist 1982; Royce 1908; Schrag 2001;

Solomon 1990; Stryker and Serpe 1994) and add a new

source of meaning to my life, that is to say, I come to see

my life as being more significant. Of course, it is quite

possible that my employer is not worthy of my allegiance

(people have been loyal to the Nazi party, the Ku-Klux-

Klan or the Mafia) and this relationship may end up

impoverishing rather than enriching me, and the new

source of meaning in my life prove illusory. This may

happen but does not have to happen: any organization

which contributes in a non-exploitative way to the satis-

faction of human needs can become a pole of a perhaps

modest, but real enriching relationship for the people who

work in it and identify with it, a new way of linking their

lives and activities to a larger purpose, of strengthening

their sense that they are of value to the world. The argu-

ment in favour of going beyond a purely arm’s-length

relationship with one’s employer is then that, acting loyally

towards it, will result in identification with it, and in so far

as its objectives are worthy of a reasonable person’s alle-

giance, this will enrich one’s interests and identity and

provide additional meaning to one’s life.

The fact that being a loyal employee can add meaning to

the employee’s life is significant as, under the conditions

that currently obtain in many countries, meaning is not

something that is handed down more or less automatically

from generation to generation and can now be taken for

granted, but rather something that many people have to

search for actively (Battista and Almond 1973; Heelas

et al. 1996). Living lives which are experienced as mean-

ingful is important; people who find their lives insuffi-

ciently meaningful, who feel that what they are doing is not

worthwhile and serves no useful purpose, are deprived in

significant ways (Baumeister 1991; Baumeister and Wilson

1996; Debats et al. 1993; Frankl 1978; Weinstein and

Cleanthous 1996).

Work can provide meaning for one’s life in other ways

also, such as through its intrinsic interest, through the

contribution it makes to the fulfilment of other human

beings, or by identifying with one’s profession (rather than

with one’s employer). Each of these sources of work-

related meaning can be worthwhile, but usually none of

them has to be exclusive and preclude the others; more

specifically, the commitments to one’s work and to one’s

profession do not have to be incompatible with each other

(Alvesson 2000; Grey 1998; Romzek 1989; Wallace 1995);

therefore, even for persons who are strongly committed to

their professions, loyalty to one’s employer may well be a

source of additional enrichment for their lives.

Greater Unity in the Employee’s Life

Still another way in which the greater identification with

the organization which results from choosing to be loyal

towards it benefits the employee is that it reduces the

compartmentalization of his life among unconnected

spheres that is so typical of modern life and which so often

results in the loss of a sense of self (Fletcher 1993; Korman

et al. 1981; Randels 2001).In so far as our actions pursue

different goals which are not related to each other and

cannot be integrated within a unifying framework, our life

as a whole cannot be organized into a coherent story, lit-

erally it cannot be understood (Baumeister and Wilson

1996; McAdams 1993). But if the success of the organi-

zation for which I work is one of my own objectives, the

significant portion of my waking hours which I devote to

work will be better integrated with the rest of my life, will

be part of my own story. As Royce (1908, p. 8) has said

‘Loyalty… tends to unify life, to give it centre, fixity,

stability.’

Loyal Employees Help Make the Organization a True

Community

If a critical mass of the employees of a work organization

become loyal, in the sense I have defined, then in the words

of Gilbert (2001, p. 5), ‘strangers grow into neighbours and

collaborators’ and the organization can become a true

community in which the members have a sense of

belonging, in which there is a certain identification of

interests among them, and in which they can find social and

emotional support and practical assistance when they face

difficulties at work or in their personal lives outside work

(Hecksher 1995; Mele 2001; Oldenquist 1982). Also, in so

far as an organization is a community the quality of social

interaction and personal relationships in it is enhanced.

Does It Make Sense to Be a Loyal Employee? 503

123

A work organization whose members are totally lacking

in loyalty and commitment towards it does not necessarily

have to be a terrible place. Even in the absence of any

loyalty or commitment, and even if ultimately each par-

ticipant is exclusively interested in advancing his or her

own interests, it is still possible, at least in principle, to

have an arm’s-length relationship in which all parties are

strictly dutiful and law-abiding and punctiliously do all

they undertook to do. But even in this best of all possible

alternatives to loyal relationships something of great

importance for human flourishing would be missing

(Baumeister and Leary 1995; Myers 1992). The dynamics

of such workplace would force each employee to restrict

his or her concern to the defence of his or her own indi-

vidual interests and to try to get as much as possible for

himself/herself at the least possible cost. To work for an

organization in which that is everybody’s attitude would

entail that the aspect of a person’s life to which she or he

devotes the greatest number of hours and one of those that

she or he perceives as more significant, would have to be

organized along the lines of a strict individualism, which

excludes radically any bonds of solidarity. Any ethical

doctrine that considers that attitudes like identification with

others, love of neighbour, or solidarity, are fundamental

requirements of personal fulfilment will necessarily per-

ceive fundamental defects in such a workplace.

The possibility of a work organization becoming a true

community becomes more important and appealing now-

adays when many traditional sources of community are

becoming weaker (Putnam 2001). In this connection,

Estlund (2003, p. 28) has reported that for most American

workers their sense of community and belonging is

increasingly linked to their place of work rather than to

community, civic or religious groups.

Loyal Relationships Have an Inherent Value

Up to this point I might have given the impression that the

value of loyalty to one’s employer is purely instrumental.

But that is not the case. It is true that being a loyal

employee is instrumental for many other benefits that stand

outside loyalty itself, but this is not incompatible with

loyalty towards one’s employer having also an intrinsic

value, even in cases where that loyalty may not be corre-

sponded or, more generally, in cases in which for one

reason or another, the benefits to which I have made ref-

erence in the preceding paragraphs may fail to materialize.

Gilbert has hinted in this direction:

[T]hese people stayed and accomplished connections

and affinity for one another that defied forces that

once made such accomplishments improbable. True,

some of their devotion went unrecognized and

unrewarded. But, by this grammar of staying here

together, for a while, improbably, the act of staying

anchored in some place is and was the meaningful

consequence (2001, p. 6). (Italics in the original)

In which way does loyalty to one’s employer have

inherent value? Assuming that one’s employer is contrib-

uting in an ethical way to the satisfaction of some personal

or social needs, the mere fact that a loyal employee has

been engaged creatively and with effort, for an extended

period of time, in trying to sustain and increase the ability

of her employer to operate more effectively has value in

itself, independently of the eventual results of her efforts.

Of course, it is better to try and succeed than to try and fail,

but it in no way follows that an attempt that fails is val-

ueless. Both history and literature afford us many examples

of people who tried to achieve valuable objectives, often

against great odds… but did not succeed. The lives of such

people are not ‘wasted’ but rather good and meaningful

along a variety of dimensions. In many ways, they may

well have been richer and better than those of other, out-

wardly more successful, individuals.

I focused in the preceding paragraph on the extreme

case of the employee who, alone among her fellow

employees, is committed to her employer. In many cases,

however, there will be in a given organization more than

one committed employee. In many such cases, the common

commitment that such employees have issues in mutual

relationships of mutual help and loyalty. Again, such

relationships are intrinsically valuable independently of

whether or not the efforts of these people are successful.

Arguments Against Loyalty to One’s Employer

A variety of arguments have been offered which purport to

show that being loyal towards one’s employer is misguided

and I will now proceed to consider them. I will only con-

sider here arguments which have prima facie force against

the definition of loyalty I have offered.

It is Possible to Participate in the Value of Loyalty

in Other Ways

Even if it is granted that engaging in loyal relationships can

be an important aspect of a person’s flourishing, would it

not be possible, as a reviewer has asked to capture the

inherent, flourishing-inducing value of loyalty by being

loyal to one’s profession or community, without neces-

sarily being a loyal employee? Indeed it is possible, and

because of this the large number of people who for one

reason or the other are precluded from engaging in a loyal

relationship with their employers are not thereby

504 J. M. Elegido

123

condemned to lead unfulfilled lives. Many other forms of

loyalty and of friendship are open to them, and so are many

other aspects of human flourishing such as, to name only a

few, knowledge, play, work, and religion. But the issue is

not whether there are alternative ways to flourish, but

whether it is reasonable not to take advantage of this one

when the opportunity of doing so presents itself. And in

making this decision, three factors to which I already

referred above in slightly different contexts are especially

relevant: very often there is no reason why one form of

loyalty should be exclusive and preclude others; work is

the activity to which most of us devote most of our waking

ours and therefore excluding loyal relationships from this

area of our lives can have great significance; and many

people nowadays have too few realistic alternative poles of

significant loyal relationships to casually discard the pos-

sibility of finding one in their working life.

Loyalty Makes the Employee Vulnerable

My definition emphasizes that loyalty requires sacrificing

one’s own interests and that in itself is a prima facie

argument against loyalty, one which, as far as I can judge

from the arguments my own students often put forward in

discussing this topic, has a good deal of practical impor-

tance. Why should I sacrifice my interests, for instance by

failing to take advantage of an alternative higher-paying, or

in other ways more attractive, employment offer; or by

engaging in behaviours which demand an investment of

effort but are not demanded by my contract of employment

and nobody is likely to notice or reward?

Of course, no sane person would recommend self-sac-

rifice for its own sake but it may be useful to point out that

perhaps this argument tries to prove too much. After all, the

element of self-sacrifice is not something exclusive to

professional loyalty. Every commitment (including those

of love and friendship) demands self-sacrifice, makes us

vulnerable and may easily become a source of suffering.

But in the same way that most sane people would be slow

to conclude from this that one should avoid entanglements

and try to live as unattached a life as possible, one should

also be slow in drawing such conclusions in the area of

professional loyalties.

Even after considering this point, someone might still

see a contradiction in my argument in this article.3

According to the definition I have offered, loyalty ‘may

demand sacrificing some aspects of one’s self-interest

beyond what would be required by one’s legal and other

moral duties.’ However, in the preceding section I have

argued that loyalty may make employees better off. As

what makes me better off is precisely what is in my self-

interest, I would seem to be contradicting myself: loyalty

would be and would not be in the employee’s self-interest.

The contradiction is only apparent, however. Loyalty

may demand, and in practice it often does demand, ‘sac-

rificing some aspects of one’s self-interest’, but as I have

argued in the preceding section it also advances our

interests in very important ways. One cannot decide whe-

ther it is worthwhile paying a certain price until one has

considered the value of what one acquires. All of us daily

sacrifice some interests… in order to advance other inter-

ests that seem more important to us and there is nothing

surprising in these trade-offs.

In order to assess some of these trade-offs, it is impor-

tant to remember my remarks above on the issue of com-

mitment leading to identification. I have mentioned that by

being loyal I help my employing organization to be more

productive and more of a community. At first sight it might

appear that these are not part of my own interests. How-

ever, in so far as I identify myself with my employer, it is

progressively less a question of balancing my own interests

with those of my employer, because I now increasingly see

my employer’s interests as my own. Paraphrasing Ewin

(1993, p. 390), I can say that if I see it as part of myself that

I am an employee of a certain organization, then I shall not

draw a very sharp distinction between my personal inter-

ests and the interests of that organization. The question

now becomes, even in relation to these interests that might

seem to lie outside myself, whether it makes sense to

sacrifice some of my interests in order to advance other

interests of mine.

Other interests that an employee can advance by being

loyal are more obviously his own. As we saw before, such

interests include increasing one’s work motivation, devel-

oping one’s character in ways that make it easier for one to

have committed relationships in other areas of one’s life,

adding meaning to one’s life, and achieving greater unity in

one’s life. I have also pointed out that, beyond the interests

of the employee that loyalty to her employer may advance,

which ultimately may be frustrated by circumstances

beyond the employee’s control, a loyal relationship is in

itself something inherently valuable and worth participat-

ing in, whatever other results may ultimately flow from it. I

do not want to conclude from this that the benefits of

loyalty to one’s employer are such that they justify any

sacrifices that such loyalty may entail, as I am not trying to

argue that loyalty is always, or even most often, justified

(or not justified for that matter). My point in this section is

more limited: the fact that employee loyalty may demand

the sacrifice of some of the employee’s interests does not

automatically entail that such loyalty is excluded.

There is an especially prominent personal sacrifice that

loyalty would seem to demand in some cases which should

3 An anonymous reviewer raised the point I address in this paragraph

and the ones following.

Does It Make Sense to Be a Loyal Employee? 505

123

be given special attention here. I refer to the danger of the

employee becoming an ‘organization man,’ so fully

devoted to the interests of his organization that it becomes

the sole source of his identity; such an employee can

become fully dependent on his employer and stop being an

autonomous individual with interests and projects of his

own and a capacity to think critically and make his own

decisions.

A well-known way of avoiding such a danger is to avoid

loyalty to one’s employer being the exclusive loyalty in

one’s life, or even the paramount one (Axinn 1994;

Haughey 1993; Randall 1987). But, more generally, it was

precisely with this danger in view that I defined the loyalty

I was interested in as a commitment which will sacrifice

some aspects of one’s self-interest and explicitly rejected

definitions which speak of thoroughgoing or wholehearted

devotion.

In other words, it can be conceded that, except in very

exceptional circumstances, it is likely to make no sense to

sacrifice all of one’s interests to a work relationship, but

this in no way negates that less all-consuming loyalties in

the work place may be conducive to the human fulfilment

of employees.

The Profit-Making Nature of Business Enterprises

Duska (1997a, p. 338), in an article first published in 1985,

has put forward the following argument:

To think we owe a company or corporation loyalty

requires us to think of that company as a person or as

a group with a goal of human fulfilment. If we think

of it in this way we can be loyal. But this is the wrong

way to think. A company is not a person. A company

is an instrument, and an instrument with a specific

purpose, the making of profit. To treat an instrument

as an end in itself … does give the instrument a moral

status it does not deserve.

For good measure, he adds:

There is nothing as pathetic as the story of the loyal

employee who, having given above and beyond the

call of duty, is let go in the restructuring of the cor-

poration. He feels betrayed because he mistakenly

viewed the company as an object of his loyalty.

In a later publication, Duska (1997b) has changed his

views on the role of profit in business. Still, my interest

here is with the article from which the above quotes are

taken, as it refers specifically to the issue of loyalty and it

has been widely discussed in the literature.

To begin with, it should be noted that while the focus of

my interest in this article is all types of work relationships,

Duska’s argument is restricted to business organizations.

Therefore it does not even pretend to touch the very large

number of employers who are not organized on a for-profit

basis. Still, I do not believe the argument is valid, or at least

generally valid, even in regard to for-profit organizations.

Duska’s statement that ‘[a] company is an instrument …with a specific purpose, the making of money’ has to be

considered carefully. Many work organizations are orga-

nized on a for-profit basis but may in fact pursue at the

same time several different objectives. Think, for instance,

of a newspaper whose primary objective is to advance a

certain political or cultural agenda; or of a wealthy busi-

nesswoman who keeps a factory operating in her town,

even though this location is not optimal from an economic

point of view, to preserve as many jobs as possible in the

area. None of these examples is purely imaginary and

many similar ones could be offered, all tending to show the

rich variety and complexity of actual motivations which we

find in the business world.

I would agree that if profit maximization were the single

factor driving decisions in a business organization, to the

exclusion of everything else except (by hypothesis) the

organization’s legal obligations, that is to say to the

exclusion of gratitude, consideration, aesthetics, respect for

people and the environment, and ethical concerns generally,

then, in most cases, that organization would not be a fit

object for loyalty. In the first place, an organization which is

exclusively profit-driven will, by definition, at all times do

what maximizes its profits and therefore cannot be relied

upon to reciprocate any past loyalty. Still, this is not a

knock-out argument as I did not include reciprocity in my

definition of loyalty and gave reasons for that choice. Sec-

ondly, and more importantly, there are many other candi-

dates for my commitment that are more appealing than

money, especially in the many societies which nowadays

live well above the limits of subsistence and are not forced

to subordinate everything else to securing the essentials of

survival. But purely profit-driven employers will not be fit

objects of loyalty in most cases, rather than invariably. A

profit-driven fund manager in charge of the savings of many

retirees could be an appropriate focus of loyalty for its

employees; in a society living on the brink of survival,

profit-focused organizations could deserve loyalty.

A point with much greater practical importance is that

very many business organizations which diligently pursue

profit fail to conform fully to the assumptions of the models

used by economists in their analyses and are not so single-

minded in the pursuit of profit as to exclude completely the

very idea of loyalty towards them (Larmer 1992; Randels

2001). The attentive reader will notice that my argument is

not that most (or many, or even some) are admirable on

ethical and/or other grounds; it is one less dependent on

demanding assumptions: that some are not so terribly bad

as to exclude completely in relation to them the very idea of

506 J. M. Elegido

123

loyalty. This claim is eminently modest. I am just arguing

that the possibility of a loyal relationship towards an

employer should not be excluded as a matter of principle

by the very fact that the employer’s primary objective is to

make profits. To ascertain the degree of loyalty that is

justified in a given case, more than armchair arguments are

needed: one has to look at the specific facts of that case and

ascertain the degree to which factors which go beyond

mere profit drive decisions in that firm and how far these

factors justify loyalty to it.

The Unreliability of Publicly Traded Corporations

Hajdin (2005, pp. 275–276) has argued as follows:

In the industrialized countries, it has, over recent

decades, become quite common for corporations with

publicly traded stock to undergo sudden and drastic

changes. Such changes are sometimes a part of a

hostile takeover, but not always: a change in the

upper-level management may produce similar results,

even when no takeover of any kind is involved… No

aspect of a corporation with publicly traded stock is

immune to such changes. Something that thousands

of people have been labouring over years to develop

may be scrapped overnight or transformed into

something completely different…

There is nothing about a corporation being that par-

ticular corporation that gives us reasons to think that it

will continue to act in any specific way beyond the next

change of higher management. A corporation is, in

other words, nothing but a legal shell that can be given

any content by the management of the day… It would

be difficult to comprehend anybody who professed to

be loyal to whatever happens to fill a particular shell.

This is a very important point that deserves attentive

consideration by anybody who is choosing a job. Hajdin is

careful not to overstate the implications of his argument.

He explicitly points out, first, that it only applies to publicly

traded corporations and that it does not rule out loyalty

altogether, but merely shows that it has to be severely

qualified. I want to add that, as is the case with the pre-

ceding argument, this argument against offering loyalty to

one’s employer does not apply at all to some not-for-profit

employers and has less force in relation to most of them

than it has for those for-profit employers who have a cor-

porate form of organization.

Loyalty Stifles Rational Criticism

Dogs provide many outstanding examples of unswerving

loyalty to their masters, to the point of death in some cases.

But the very fact that many dogs exhibit this attitude may

lead us to suspect that loyalty may not, after all, be

appropriate for human beings (Dunford 1999).

It is often argued that being loyal is incompatible with

thinking critically of those one is loyal to or with scrutin-

ising untrustingly their instructions (Corvino 2002; Ewin

1993; Fletcher 1993; Hajdin 2005). There have even been

well-known cases in which it was incontestable that the

behaviour required from a subordinate was unethical but in

which it was argued that the sacrifice of the subordinate’s

own principles and personal convictions would only prove

that his loyalty was great enough, up to the demands of this

very special sacrifice. Totalitarian leaders have been

notable for demanding the unswerving and unquestioning

loyalty of their subjects with well-known consequences

(Mele 2001). The frequency with which a claim of loyalty

has been used to demand unethical behaviour from sub-

ordinates lends resonance to the saying that ‘when an

organization wants you to do right, it asks for your integ-

rity; when it wants you to do wrong, it demands your

loyalty’ (Kleinig 2008, p. 4).

This unsavoury side of loyalty can infect work rela-

tionships as much as any others. The chronicles of many

business scandals feature episodes in which some

employees had discovered that their employers were doing

seriously harmful things, but were induced by an appeal to

their loyalty to co-operate in their employers’ wrongs, or at

least to refrain from reporting them to the appropriate

authorities. Some people conclude that if loyalty is capable

of making people suspend in this way their capacity for

moral judgment it would seem something to be avoided

rather than recommended.

At this point also, it may be useful to point out that

similar arguments could be put forward against any other

type of loyalty and commitment. If we do not believe that

the argument is strong enough to justify the decision to

pursue a life totally free from attachments, we may be less

impressed by it in the specific area of work relationships.

Business ethicists have treated this issue most frequently

in the context of whistleblowing. They have generally

concluded that, provided that other avenues for stopping

the harm the employer is doing seem not practicable and

that there is proportionality between that harm and the

harms that the employer and its stakeholders will suffer by

the employee’s denunciation of the employer’s inappro-

priate behaviour to the authorities or to the general public,

a sane loyalty would not be incompatible with blowing the

whistle, far less would it require active co-operation with

the employer’s unethical behaviour (Boatright 2003;

Corvino 2002; De George 2006; Kleinig 2008; Larmer

1992). Different writers frame this general conclusion in

different ways, depending on their respective conceptions

of loyalty and their general ethical positions. On my own

Does It Make Sense to Be a Loyal Employee? 507

123

part, it should be enough to point out that nothing in the

definition of loyalty I offered above would commit any-

body who concludes that offering such loyalty to her

employer is a desirable thing to feel obliged to suspend her

moral judgment or to override her conclusions on what is

the right thing to do.

Conclusions

I have examined several ways in which a loyal commit-

ment towards one’s employer can make one’s life signifi-

cantly richer. I believe that an attentive consideration of the

arguments I have reviewed provides strong reasons not to

be hasty in embracing the popular dismissal of professional

loyalty as irrelevant to modern conditions. However, it is

important to realize that, if they are examined carefully, all

the arguments in favour of loyalty to one’s employer that I

have discussed tend to show that a certain (and variable)

degree of loyalty is likely to be appropriate provided that

the objectives and values of an organization are appealing.

As far as I can see, none of them provides conclusive

reasons to act loyally ‘without restrictions or qualifications’

and ‘no matter the circumstances.’ In other words, all of the

reasons in favour of being a loyal employee that I have

discussed above are conditional in nature: they only show

that in so far as some conditions obtain, being loyal in

some ways towards one’s employer can be one way of

leading a more fulfilling life.

Something similar can be said of all the objections to the

idea of being a loyal employee that I have examined. None

of them provides an absolute argument, valid at all times

and in all contexts, against being loyal to one’s employer.

However, they succeed in making it clear that in cer-

tain situations loyalty will be misguided and also that

loyalty should have limits. While generally speaking, a

loyal relationship with his employer may be conducive to

an employee’s fulfilment, this will not be necessarily so in

relation to all employers and even less so in relation to all

the different ways in which loyalty can be expressed. A

consideration of the objections against loyalty which I have

discussed will help the reader to better appreciate my

decision to stay clear of a totalizing conception of loyalty

in my definition and to opt instead for defining it in a way

that admits of more and less; some of the arguments I

examined show than in many circumstances a hundred-per-

cent commitment to an employer would not make sense:

Many employers may deserve some commitment, but not a

total commitment; there may well be some doubt that some

employers will keep deserving in future the same degree of

commitment they deserve now; there is always an element

of risk that the employer may fail to reciprocate the com-

mitment it is given and it may be appropriate to take

precautions to minimize one’s losses if that were to be the

case. Even accepting the arguments in favour of loyalty

and agreeing that there are many ways in which a loyal

relationship with one’s employer may be a very fine thing,

all of these factors will often tend to recommend to express

one’s loyalty in some ways but not in others, and to accept

a certain degree of self-denial in acting loyally, but not a

greater one.

At this stage some readers may feel disappointed that I

am not able to reach more determinate conclusions. I seem

to say that loyalty will be appropriate in some cases, but

not in others. Could I not be more specific and indicate

whether loyalty is justified in typical present-day

employment?

Let me be forthright in addressing this potential objection.

Considering the issue globally, employees find themselves

in an extraordinary variety of situations. There are different

types of work, going all the way from the almost purely

manual and numbingly repetitive to the most challenging

which requires the highest degrees of education and skill.

There are different types of employers: public and private,

for-profit and not-for-profit, large and small, highly princi-

pled and unscrupulous, and so on. Very importantly, and this

factor is often overlooked in discussions of the issue, the

countries in which employees work differ very greatly in

culture, legal environment and degree of economic devel-

opment. And there are still other dimensions along which

employment situations differ. With the limitation of

knowledge available to us, it is simply impossible to decide

what is the typical present-day employment relationship. In

relation to the vast majority of working human beings, we

just do not have the data to start attempting to address that

issue with any rigour. Precisely one of my main criticisms to

the work of many scholars which have addressed before me

the topic of loyalty in the employment relationship is that

they have tended to overlook this wide variety of situations

and therefore have reached conclusions that, while making

sense in the context of the situations they were considering,

lacked even prima-facie plausibility as soon as they were

considered in the context of different situations. This applies

more especially to some of the scholars that have argued

against the appropriateness of loyalty to one’s employer.

Even if, as I have argued above, the conclusions of many of

the scholars who deny the appropriateness of loyalty in the

workplace are too general and for that reason are open to

criticism, partly as a consequence of their work, a climate of

opinion has become widespread that tends to dismiss out of

hand the mere possibility of engaging in a loyal relationship

with one’s employer.

But even though I grant that I cannot provide a perfectly

general answer about the appropriateness of loyalty in the

typical situation, there are two things that I feel confident in

doing on the basis of this article. In the first place, as I have

508 J. M. Elegido

123

already mentioned above, I can stress that in many situa-

tions loyalty in the workplace can be a very fine thing,

highly conducive to the flourishing of the employee. Sec-

ondly, beyond this general consideration, I can provide

practical guidance by highlighting the main factors one

should look for in specific situations. The more an

employer’s purposes are in fact restricted to the creation of

profit and the more the legal form of organization of an

employer, its culture, and the circumstances surrounding it

make it likely or possible for it to change radically its

purposes and commitments, the less appropriate it will be

to engage with that employer in a loyal employment rela-

tionship as defined above; while, conversely, the more

worthwhile the purposes of the employer and the more it

constitutes a real community, and the more one can expect

a degree of mutuality in the relationship, the more it will be

reasonable to commit more fully to that employer.

Perhaps all of this can be brought to a point if we

address specifically the issue that concerns most some

critics of loyalty to one’s employer. Would it be appro-

priate to offer loyalty to a large publicly quoted American

business organization? According to the principles I have

discussed above I would answer that it will depend above

all on how far its purposes are restricted to the pursuit of

profit, to the exclusion of anything else. In so far as they are

not and they are purposes worthy of a moral person’s

allegiance, loyalty to that employer will be appropriate. At

this point, a second question must be asked. Should that

loyalty take the form of a commitment to remain attached

to that employer, rejecting if necessary more advantageous

job offers? Given the frequency with which corporate

reorganizations and changes of mission occur among

American large publicly quoted companies, one will have

to assess carefully, in the specific circumstances of each

case, the likelihood of that commitment being reciprocated.

If that likelihood is low, it could well be unwise to express

one’s loyalty in that form. Notice, however, that even in

this type of situation, it can still be fully appropriate to be a

loyal employee and to show one’s loyalty in other ways.

Also, it will always be appropriate to keep in mind that

loyalty to one’s employer is not a justification for co-

operating with him or her in unethical behaviour or for

suspending one’s moral judgment, and that outside very

rare and unusual circumstances, it is dangerous and

unjustified to make one’s employer the paramount—far

less exclusive—focus of loyalty in one’s life (Hart and

Thompson 2007; Haughey 1993).

In my view, the more general conclusion that emerges

from this article is that, other things being equal, it is very

much worthwhile to try and be a loyal employee but that,

first of all, it is necessary to consider carefully the ways of

expressing that loyalty, which make sense here and now in

view of one’s special circumstances and commitments and,

secondly, that loyalty is by no means appropriate with

regards to all employers and that therefore one has to look

carefully for an employer to whom it may make sense to be

loyal and with whom to have a relationship of mutual

commitment. In practical terms, what this means is that

when one is considering job and career options, the issue of

the suitability of different employers as worthwhile poles

of a loyal work relationship is very much worth paying

attention to.

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