Firing Dilemma

Managers often face choices where harming a few people benefits the business overall, e.g., downsizing under crisis. They report such decisions as very difficult even when efficient. Sacrificial managerial decisions (e.g., cutting a job to save many) resemble classic moral dilemmas (e.g., harming one person to save many) in both psychological processing and resulting social perceptions. Past work suggests that people experience cognitive-emotional conflict when facing moral tradeoffs. Moreover, moral dilemma decisions have downstream consequences for social perceptions: those who accept sacrifice appear colder but more competent than those who do not. Six preregistered studies (N=2,231) explored whether similar patterns emerge for business dilemmas, scenarios in which impairing the well-being of one employee will produce better outcomes for a whole team or organization (e.g., downsizing to sustain business under financial constraints). People reported that such workplace dilemmas feel difficult and disagreed over the best course of action. They rated harm-rejecting managers higher in warmth than competence and the harm-accepting ones higher in competence than warmth. Even though accepting the sacrificial harm negatively affected perceptions of a manager's warmth, overtly expressed emotional concern for the victim offset this effect. Organizational role also mattered: people expected bosses more so than coworkers to sacrifice team members; however, they viewed bosses more favorably when they avoided such sacrifice. Finally, participants assigned to the role of a boss themselves chose to sacrifice others more often, although this effect emerged only in less-experienced workers. Together, these results suggest that workplace tradeoffs parallel moral dilemmas in that people experience cognitive-emotional conflict when solving them, while decisions on such tradeoffs affect social perceptions. Results have implications for better understanding executive stress, moral distress, and decision fatigue in the workplace.