LAERADESALLY

When wrongdoing is ongoing in any organization, people usually find out about it sooner or later. From sexual harassment to racial stereotyping to revenue manipulation, wrongdoings may encompass misfeasance at the highest level or lower down in the totem pole. Should people - can people - legitimately reveal such wrongdoing? People who place loyalty in an unchallenged position at the top of the scale of ethical values would say “No.”
Yet the idea that the loyalty to one’s employer trumps all other ethical obligations is startling and dangerous. It’s also distasteful. We have duties to our employers not to disclose trade secrets, not to compete with them on the side, and to avoid doing things that will lead to legal or reputation problems.
Although we can expect a developing spin from the White House on McClellan’s revelations, it’s interesting that the initial response has not been to say that McClellan was wrong - either about the selling of the Iraq war or the CIA leak case. The “disloyalty” allegation shifts the focus from the truth to the propriety of McClellan having said anything at all. Indeed, many view the fact that the White House has not taken on McClellan on the merits as a tacit admission that his allegations are true.
Important though it is, we as a society don’t accept that loyalty is pre-eminent. In 2002, Time Magazine named Cynthia Cooper of WorldCom, Coleen Rowley of the FBI and Sherron Watkins of Enron as Persons of the year for their whistle-blowing activities, Cooper and Rowley for their role in disclosing two of the major corporate scandals of the first years of this decade, and Rowley for charging that the FBI had failed to follow leads on one of the chief plotters of the 9/11 conspiracy against the United States. For these women, and for those of us who did and do applaud them, integrity is a value more deserving the pre-eminence than loyalty.
Where an employee speaks out against wrongdoing, employers don’t play the loyalty card because what the employee has said is incorrect or untruthful. They invoke loyalty because the allegations are truthful. Loyalty is important and we rightly pay great deference to it. But when it becomes the smokescreen to hide wrongdoing, we shouldn’t pay any deference to it at all. People with robust commitments to integrity won’t be content to work for companies that send the message “loyalty to the company,” must trump that commitment to honesty.
Organizations that want ethics to flourish will resist the temptation of playing the loyalty card to prevent disclosures of wrongdoing. Rather than worrying about what song the whistle-blower sings, they should make sure that there’s no tune to play.