Employee Promotion in the Civil Sector

This article was originally published on the 11th of October. Revisions were made to the earlier article for republishing.
Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments in the 1960s revealed the stark psychological process through which obedience to authority seemingly overrode the moral imperatives of its subjects. An aspect of Milgram’s obedience experiments could be relevant the civil sector in Singapore: the fact that with an added dissenting voice with the principle authority figure, whether in the form of another experimenter or teacher, the obedience rate was greatly reduced. These considerations can be applied to the process of employee promotion in the Singapore civil sector that appear to reward loyalty and obedience to an authoritative figure. These implications point out a need for a diminishing role for these authoritative figures in the civil sector while increasing the influence of peers and subordinates.

Milgram recruited experimental subjects that delivered electric shocks to ‘learners’ as they made mistakes. Eighty per cent of them delivered ‘very strong’ shocks of 200 volts, and 60 percent delivered the maximum intensity, despite screams of pain from the learners. Subjects hovered over a common theme of ‘loyalty’ and ‘duty’ to the experimenter for their reasons of doing so. The only thing that reduced the rate of obedience was the presence in the room of other people – whether ‘teachers’ or another ‘experimenter’ — that disagreed with the principal authority figure.

 The lesson drawn from the Milgram experiments that individuals were willing to perform an action irrespective of its content in order to show compliance to an authoritative figure and possibly obtain reward for evidence of this loyalty is transmutable to the process of employee promotion in the civil sector. The pivotal factor in decisions of promotion in civil service lies squarely with authoritative figures helming the various ministries in the civil sector. An employee’s subordinates or peers generally do not have a say in whether the employee receives promotion within the civil sector. Thus, more often than not, civil servants are keen to impress upon these authoritative figures qualities of loyalty, compliance and obedience in order to meet with their approval — not unlike the subjects of Milgram’s experiments.

The motivations for civil servants doing so are arguably stronger than that of Milgram’s case: whereas subjects in the experiment are not promised any form of reward for their compliance, and have the liberty to leave the experimental room at any point they wish, modern employees in the civil service in Singapore are often weighed down by contractual, scholarship or bond obligations and other factors concerning that of their income, family sustenance and livelihood — that would certainly improve with the prospects of a promotion. In this regard, civil servants are arguably willing to execute acts that show compliance to authority irrespective of the content of these acts more than the subjects of Milgram’s experiments.

If at any point of time a civil servant disregards obedience or compliance to the orders of an authoritative figure for reasons of her conscience, she would very likely hurt her very own chance of a promotion. This is simply because it is in the self-interest of superiors and authoritative figures to command the loyalty and obedience of their subordinates. If the power to actually decide a promotion lies strongly in the hands of these authoritative figures, and if the employee decides to work against the interest of these individuals, then she directly harms her own chances of securing a promotion.

The problem here lies with the strictly authoritarian nature of civil service that mirrors the power structure of the Milgram experiments. If we wish to avoid the possible moral conflict where an unethical action is carried out solely in respect for compliance to an authority without regard to the ethical nature of its content, then we need to rework the authoritarian nature of the civil service in Singapore, and more specifically as is the focus our consideration here, the authoritarian process of civil service promotion.

As in the Milgram experiments, a decrease in the rate of obedience to authority is noticed when more alternative opinions are introduced from either another ‘experimenter’ or ‘teacher’ that contrasts with the figure of authority of the principal experimenter. The unethical action of a continued deliverance of a stronger electric jolt to a person screaming in pain is often halted in this scenario. If we were to apply a corresponding move in the civil service of Singapore, it would be to democratize the process of civil servant promotion — that is to say, the concentrated role of authoritative figures in decisions of promotion must be diminished, and more significance in the decision must be accorded to the peers and subordinates of the civil servant. This would decrease the likelihood of an absolute obedience to a single authority that may result in a similar unethical action in the civil service.

A possible critique of such a move would be to argue that this only merely increases the amount of authoritative figures, but does not remove the possibility of an unethical action carried out in compliance to these new ‘authority’ figures if they can all come to agree. In extreme scenarios, this may actually create a stronger case for the employee to comply. For instance, if the introduction of additional experimenters and teachers in the Milgram experiment can all come to a common viewpoint that the ‘teacher’ should proceed to deliver the shocks no matter the screams from the ‘learner’, the subject in the case of the experiment may be more severely pushed to comply.

Although the introduction of extra deciding agents in the process of promoting an employee within a civil service does not completely remove such a possibility, it does in fact decrease the chance of all these agents agreeing on an absolute viewpoint. To further expand the base from which opinions and reviews are solicited and factored in the promotion process is to further decrease the possibility of all agents simultaneously concurring.  There is a lesser likelihood of a complete agreement the greater a sample size we procure reviews to factor in a promotional decision from.

It is a clear that in the process of employee promotion, the role of the employee’s superior as an absolute authoritative figure ought to be diminished. If the decision of promoting an individual in a civil service  is not decided solely by the employee’s superior, and the power of decision is instead spread out through canvassing a reasonable amount of peer and subordinate reviews and appraisals, the legitimacy of a hitherto absolute opinion may be challenged and conflicted. Through the democratization of the process of promoting an employee, we may perhaps truly prevent another parallel of Milgram’s experiment from formalizing in the civil service workplace.