Name: Sabeed Ejaz

Roll No.: BB-18-60 (Morning)

Semester: BBA 6th
Subject: Ethics
Submitted To: Sir Farhan Mir
“ETHICAL DILEMMA”
You Want Me to Do What?
You’re a bright, female investment analyst about to give a major presentation to a group of
bankers supporting a corporate acquisition. After walking in and meeting the bankers before
you give the presentation, you’re asked by your boss to “be a dear and serve them coffee.”
Imagine the insult and awkwardness of such a situation—what do you do? Do you carry
through with the task, sacrificing your dignity or doing something wrong because you can’t
afford to lose the job? Or do you speak up?
A group of Swiss occupational health researchers have recently started a
program of research on illegitimate tasks, or task that violate “norms about what can
reasonably be expected from a given person” in a job. Therefore, illegitimate tasks are
unethical and violate or offend one’s professional and task identity. What might cause
supervisors and managers within organizations to allocate these kinds of tasks? One study
points to a variety of organizational characteristics, including competition of resources among
departments of units, unfair resources allocation procedures, and an unclear decisional
structure.
Researchers have found that these sorts of tasks can have some nasty
outcomes. For one, illegitimate tasks lead to increased stress and CWB, even after controlling
for the effort reward imbalance, organizational justice, and personality traits. Illegitimate tasks
can literally keep you up at night: one study found that, on days in which these tasks
performed, the employees took longer to fall asleep and woke up more often in the middle of
the night. Another study found that these tasks lead to high negative effect and psychological
detachment at the end of the work day. Other studies found that illegitimate tasks lead to
lowered self-esteem and job satisfaction from day to day, along with increase in anger and
depression. Illegitimate tasks can also cause people to want to leave their jobs, although if
their leader was appreciative of them, they were less likely to want to leave.