When your workplace doesn’t match your ethical outlook – the problem of ‘moral injury’ |
When earthquakes struck Turkey and Syria in February 2023, more than 50,000 people were killed and thousands more were injured.
One month after the disaster, a bank employee named Efe Demir died by suicide in İstanbul. Before his death, he had sent an email to colleagues questioning the actions and motivations of his employer, saying he felt that the organisation prioritised profit over caring for clients who were victims of the tragedy.
The bank strongly denied the allegations, but Demir’s accusation highlights a broader, and often invisible, problem: how a corporate approach, especially in times of crisis, can cause employees to experience psychological harm.
Sometimes referred to as “moral injury” or “ethical suffering”, it often involves feelings of distress that arise when workers are compelled to act solely in the interest of profit.
The psychiatrist Christophe Dejours, who specialises in work and mental health, has argued that the complexities of work require employees to constantly expend emotional and cognitive energy navigating moral dilemmas.
Those dilemmas could be to do with a company’s environmental record for example, or how it relates to a country engaged in a........