The Ethical Dilemma

In my former role as an Assistant Director, I held two positions at once. I was the direct supervisor of a team of employees, responsible for their daily work, their development, and their wellbeing. I was also a member of the organization's leadership team, responsible for helping carry out decisions about staffing, workload, compensation, and promotion.

Over time I observed two patterns. First, some employees carried noticeably greater workloads than colleagues who were compensated at the same or a higher level. Second, some employees took on responsibilities well beyond their job descriptions, yet were not given opportunities for promotion or reclassification that reflected that work.

As a supervisor, I saw the effort up close. As a member of leadership, I also understood that decisions about pay and promotion were not mine alone. They sat inside the organization's policies and leadership structure, which I was expected to work within. Both of those things were true at the same time, and that is what made this hard.

These problems are not unique to one office. McClure (2025) argues that many difficulties in higher education workplaces stem from organizational structures and norms rather than individual failings, pointing specifically to poor compensation practices, limited advancement opportunities, and inadequate recognition. Verhoeven and Thøis Madsen (2022) note that when employees take on roles on top of their assigned tasks, the result can be role overload, role conflict, and job stress. Both describe the conditions I saw on my own team.

My responsibility to employees. As their supervisor, I was responsible for supporting the people on my team and advocating for them when I believed they were being treated unfairly. If I stayed silent, I would be accepting an arrangement I believed was inequitable for people who depended on me to speak for them.

My responsibility to the organization. As a member of the leadership team, I was expected to work within the organization's policies and leadership structure, and I was responsible for supporting decisions the organization had made and for weighing employee needs against budget limits, policies, and the needs of other units. If I pushed too hard against those decisions, I risked undermining the leadership team I belonged to and the trust my colleagues placed in me.

The course syllabus defines an ethical dilemma as a situation in which every available course of action results in compromising the principles of the ethical actor, the stakeholders, or both. My situation fits that definition. If I strongly advocated for my employees by challenging decisions about workload, compensation, and promotion, I could compromise my responsibilities to the organization and create conflict with other members of leadership. If I accepted those decisions without advocating, I could compromise my own values of fairness, respect, and responsibility to the people I supervised, leave employees feeling unsupported, and allow the concerns about their treatment to go unaddressed. No choice avoided some kind of ethical compromise.

Ethical actor: me, as the Assistant Director. The decision about whether and how to advocate was mine to make, and the consequences of that decision would fall on me as well as on others.

Research suggests these groups are unlikely to see the situation the same way. In a study of one university, Le et al. (2021) found that employees expressed more negative concerns about organizational justice than managers did across every dimension of inclusion examined. As someone who sat in both groups, I could see both perspectives at once, which is exactly what made the decision difficult.