Loyalty

The loyalty of employees is held to be a good thing for organizations. Supposedly, organizations want loyal employees because the perception is that they work harder and longer than just “committed” employees. Further, longtime loyal employees retain corporate knowledge and are socialized into the corporate culture. The “ideal type” of workplace loyalty is itself a fallacy. This concept of a “job-for-life,” whereby an employee joins a company and stays loyal to it throughout his/her working career and, in return, the employee receives a lifelong job, was only ever available to a few working-class and middle-class men of the mid-20th century.

Far more common and usual is for employees to switch employers, job types, and occupations. Workers do not stay with employers for a long time, with employee tenure in the United States at a median of 4.4 years in 2010. Though the average number of occupations a person holds during a lifetime is contested, the estimate of five to seven careers is a common one. Lack of workplace commitment has been characterized as evidence of a change in the way we work, with deleterious effects on the workplace and society. Richard Sennett posits that a decline in civic engagement is partly fostered by the shift in workforce patterns to shorter tenure, contract and casual employment, and hence a lack of loyalty.

What loyalty is, in the context of a workplace, is unclear. One perspective holds that loyalty in a paid relationship is not loyalty at all but merely a contractual agreement to do “right” by an employer. The use of loyalty in this context, then, is the misappropriation of an emotive term better suited to family, religion, and nation. Conversely, given that loyalty can be felt by an employee to an organization on the same terms with the same effects as other loyalties, then perhaps it should be considered like those. The existence of an explicit monetary exchange within the relationship is the problem. However, taking a broader view of loyalty indicates there is always an exchange of something, or at least the promise of an exchange. In the case of family and it is of support, for religion it is an afterlife, and for national loyalty it is succor and support. Loyalty is an emotion of social interaction, in that it shapes the actor's actions by orienting choices based on past experiences and future expectations. Loyalties help define identity, including in the workplace, and offer reasons for action. For example, loyal employees will defend their company because they perceive it to be part of themselves and representative of them.