Responsibility at Work: How Leading Professionals Act (or Don’t Act) Responsibly (review)

Responsibility at Work is an outstanding contribution to the literature of leadership and professionalism, integrating a variety of approaches and transcending disciplines. The book is a summary of 10 years of research in the GoodWork project which explored current notions of good work in many contexts. The analysis examined technical skill, integrity, service, professional norms, and benefit to the public. The project generated a four-part rubric for the analysis of good work: professional standards, cultural controls, social controls, and outcome controls (p. 7). Responsibility at Work focuses on a multifaceted analysis of the answers to one question in the study, “ To whom or what do you feel responsible in your work” (p. 6)?

One obvious focus of this book is balance. The methodology incorporates qualitative and quantitative cross analyses of the original data base of interviews with 1,200 people from nine different professions: journalism, theater, genetics, higher education, philanthropy, law, medicine, business, and K-12 education. Individual chapters also emphasize balance or framing continua that allow nuanced understanding of each topic.

Some examples include the public self and the private self, balancing past and future in decision making, finding the sources of creativity along a continuum from divine imperative to social need, leadership as caring vs. leadership as achievement, control and responsibility, and masculinity vs. femininity both as a set of personal characteristics and also a work style of particular professions.

In an era when the consequences of irresponsibility at work have caused great emotional and economic suffering, the topic of this book is quite timely. The book is divided into four sections: “Powerful Models of Responsibility,” “Factors that Modulate Responsibility,” “The Limits of Responsibility,” and “Toward Greater Responsibility.” The models provide several approaches to analyzing the subject of responsibility without allowing the reader to lapse into a simplistic either/or diagnosis of the topic.

Gardner discusses the connection between personal morality and the moral/ethical guidelines of the professions which combine either to support or to undermine an individual’s ability to do good work. Subsequent chapters explore the ethics of caring, the ethics of excellence and creativity, and the ethics of service. Each ethical approach supports the development of personal responsibility with a particular emphasis.

In the section on “Factors that Modulate Responsibility,” each author explores the interactions of personal responsibility and professional/institutional context. Balancing commitment to the population served by two professions, teaching and medicine, yields insight into two different approaches to decision making. Both professions put responsibility to their client populations above all in their work but take two different approaches to balancing their lives. The teachers in the sample tried to keep their work activities out of their home lives while the physicians tried to extend their time with patients despite the demands of managed-care organizations that interfered with their autonomy.

Individuals whose work motivations involved service to God faced balancing responsibilities to their clients, as an aspect of vocation, with responsibilities to themselves, as an aspect of their spiritual practice. The most powerful resolution of this conflict was to frame work as spiritual practice, healing the world and healing the self concurrently. The focal problem these individuals faced was overcoming the modern tendency to separate God from the world, a frame of reference which causes the conflict that mindfulness in vocation addresses.

Additional factors that modulate responsibility are raised by the question, “Responsibility to whom?” Leaders must balance their responsibility to achieve the economic goals of their organization, to the community which supports their organization, and to their employees. In this chapter another dichotomy emerges between more and less experienced leaders. The less experienced faced conflicts in balancing responsibility to their various constituencies while the more experienced focused on integrity in practice. Using this framework, once again, conflicts became less problematic.

Using the dichotomy of “caring versus individualized” professions, this chapter compares a professional’s sense of responsibility directly to clients or to...