The Ethics of Engagement in an Age of Austerity: A Paradox Perspective

Abstract

Our contribution in this paper is to highlight the ethical implications of workforce engagement strategies in an age of austerity. Hard or instrumentalist approaches to workforce engagement create the potential for situations where engaged employees are expected to work ever longer and harder with negative outcomes for their well-being. Our study explores these issues in an investigation of the enactment of an engagement strategy within a UK Health charity, where managers and workers face paradoxical demands to raise service quality and cut costs. We integrate insights from engagement, paradox, and ethic of care literatures, to explore these paradoxical demands-illustrating ways in which engagement experiences become infused with tensions when the workforce faces competing requirements to do 'more with less' resources. We argue that those targeted by these paradoxical engagement strategies need to be supported and cared for, embedded in an ethic of care that provides explicit workplace resources for helping workers and managers cope with and work through corresponding tensions. Our study points to the critical importance of support from senior and frontline managers for open communications and dialogue practices.

The Lived Experience of Paradox: How Individuals Navigate Tensions during the Pandemic Crisis

“…During this pandemic, employees are asked to simultaneously strive to meet performance targets (e.g., sales targets, time-keeping) whilst applying novel hygiene directives (e.g., issued by health agencies or based on corporate rules) such as wearing masks, hand-sanitizing and maintaining as well as enforcing physical distance from coworkers and clients. In interactive service work (e.g., waiters, care workers, retail workers, actors), workers struggle to integrate competing requirements on a day-to-day base (Francis & Keegan, 2020; Schneider et al, 2020). They must be creative and learn from varied and often ambivalent customer views and feedback on their efforts.…”

“…In interactive service work (e.g. waiters, care workers, retail workers, actors), workers struggle to integrate competing requirements on a day-to-day base (Schneider, Bullinger & Brandl, 2020;Francis and Keegan, 2020). They must be creative and learn from varied and often ambivalent customer views and feedback on their efforts.…”

Job candidates’ reactions to AI-Enabled job application processes

“…Second, it was brief because often organizations do not provide any information on their AI-enabled job application systems and typically only mention that they may use AI in the process. Finally, the scenario also included the definition of artificial intelligence by Kaplan and Haenlein [52] referred to earlier [4,11,14,18,20,32,33,36,41,45,48,49,54,60,64,69,76,81,[84][85][86][87]95].…”

Handling tensions in human resource management: Insights from paradox theory

“…Furthermore, paradox theorists have drawn attention to how rendering latent tensions salient, or vice versa, is always a temporary achievement and an ongoing endeavour, while a durable final balance or optimal level of fit that eliminates (HRM) tensions is probably very difficult to achieve (Francis and Keegan, 2018). By responding to tensions, HR practitioners can engage in what paradox scholars have identified as ‘an iterative and dynamic process … as they experience situations as paradoxical, often shifting from one response to another’ (Jarzabkowski and Lê, 2017: 436).…”