Guest post: How long a chain of logic do you have to use?

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on Without forgetting her nursing training.

I’ve been trying to sort out my views on when someone’s statements or behavior outside of their work capacity should justify disciplinary action. (I mean morally justify, not what the legal lines are.)

It’s hard to come up with a formulation that doesn’t involve a lot of case-by-case judgment. The extreme bright-line rules don’t seem workable to me. It just can’t be the case that an employer should shrug and ignore a manager who is posting statements about how members of group X are intellectualy inferior, etc. — that obviously raises concerns that such a person can’t fairly make hiring/firing/employee evaluation decisions. Ditto for someone who is the “face of the company” but has made themselves toxic to the general public and/or your customer base, etc. Conversely, I’m also uncomfortable with the notion that people can’t have separate existences from their job, and that every employee’s every utterance is fodder for HR.

There’s obviously a lot of factors to consider (is it a public-facing job, how far beyond the pale are the statements, etc.), but one thing I think matters is: how long a chain of logic do you have to use to reach the conclusion that this affects someone’s ability to do the job?

When you have to make arguments like “Employee X made statement Y. Statement Y is contrary to the position of advocacy groups for minority such-and-such. Therefore Y constitutes ‘violence’ against that group, and members of that group would be justifiably ‘afraid’ to be treated by X even if X would never utter Y on the job, therefore X can’t do the job and must be fired or disciplined,” I think something has gone wrong.

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