Organizational Moral Distress

Organizational moral distress is an extension of the concept of individual moral distress. Moral distress at the individual level is the anguish a person may experience when he or she is convinced he or she knows the right thing to do but is prevented from doing it.

When applied at the level of organizations, it is a useful way to characterize and analyze conflicts or misalignment of values that can interfere with excellent organization function.

Organizations, like people, have goals and values. Organizations meet their goals by employing people to fill various roles, to take on responsibilities, and to function within the processes and systems that the organization creates. How the organization prioritizes its goals, how it designs its systems, structures, or processes to meet them, and whom it chooses to employ are a reflection of its values.

The values of an organization are generally stated in mission or vision statements and are sometimes referred to as “core values.” These statements articulate the values the organization says it endorses. They are the values that the organization says it expects all its employees, including its leadership, to abide by. Moreover, these values can be perceived as a standard by which the organization can be judged. We judge individuals on whether or not they consistently live up to the values they say they endorse. So too we judge organizations on whether or not they consistently live up to the values they say they endorse.

Moral distress can arise when the organization says it values something other than what it actually values, or when the people it employs do not share the same values as the organization, or when the organization's internal stakeholders prioritize similar values differently. For instance, an organization might say that it values the quality of its product or service more than it does cost. But if the design of its processes produces outcomes that are very inexpensive, but of poor quality, then there may be a misalignment of values between what the organization says it values and what it actually values. Similarly, if an organization employs persons with radically different values or persons who share the same values but prioritize them differently, then there may be a misalignment of values between the organization and the people it has chosen to help fulfill its goals. An organization that values individual competitiveness and aggressiveness might find itself at odds with an individual whose highest priority is family time. Similarly, individuals who value competitiveness and aggressiveness would find themselves ill placed in roles that required teamwork and cooperation. Or leaders of different organizational divisions or with different responsibilities within the organization may have responsibilities that reflect different values, or that require prioritizing shared values differently. For [Page 1551]instance, an organization might value both price and safety of a product or service, but a marketing function might value price over safety while an engineering function might value safety over price. In each instance, the situation is characterized by a values misalignment, and in each instance, the potential exists for organizational moral distress to arise.

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