Download An Introduction to the Concept of Administrative Evil

Leading Questions: Leadership, Ethics, and Administrative Evil
Abstract: Administrative Evil is a relatively new ethical concept that originated in the
field of Public Administration with the publication of Guy Adams and Danny Balfour’s
1998 book Unmasking Administrative Evil. It describes the phenomenon whereby
otherwise well-intentioned individuals participate in systems that cause harm to innocent
people. This essay explores the concept and suggests that the implications for leadership
studies and practice are worthy of additional exploration. A critique of the concept is
provided along with questions that could point the way to additional research.
Keywords:
Leadership, Ethics, Administrative Evil, Moral Reasoning
Introduction
Professors Guy Adams and Danny Balfour introduced the concept of administrative evil
in their 1998 book Unmasking Administrative Evil. The third edition, released in 2009, expanded
the concept and included additional case studies. As scholars of public administration they were
interested in the intersection of ethics and public service, including the ethical roles and
responsibilities of public sector leaders. Driving their inquiry and figuring largely in their
analysis was the Holocaust and the role of the German civil service in service to a government
that perpetuated organized mass murder. Such levels of organized destruction could not have
been accomplished without availing the organs of an efficiently operating government, yet many
of the public servants (police, public transportation officials, and records clerks to name a few)
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had a connection to the downstream effects of their labor. Some knew, some suspected, and
others were oblivious.
Administrative evil is a relatively new concept and I submit that it is one of the more
useful additions to the study of leadership and ethics. The essence of Adams and Balfour’s
argument is that the modern age, specifically a mode of thought they describe as “technical
rationality,” with its emphasis on the scientific-analytic mindset and belief in technological
progress has served to dim our moral imaginations (2009a, pp. 4-5). Artifacts of this mindset
include division of labor, extensive role specialization, and compartmentalization that are often
found in large and complex organizations. Such artifacts serve to separate organizational
members from the consequences of their actions.
Modern organizations, as noted, are characterized by the diffusion of information and the
fragmentation of responsibility. With diffuse and scattered information, literally no one in
the organization may have a complete enough picture to adequately comprehend the
destructive activity to actively try to reverse course. Those who might have enough of a
picture to perceive that something is wrong may well assume that higher management is
aware of the problem and has chosen to do nothing about it. (Adams, 2011, p. 283)
The result is the very real possibility that well-intentioned people who conscientiously
perform their jobs will unintentionally participate in systems and processes that produce great
harm. Some may not even be aware that they are doing anything wrong, they certainly intend no
great harm, and furthermore, those around them would likely agree at the time that they are
simply acting in consonance with accepted professional roles and practices. They may also play
a crucial part in a larger process that perpetrates harm.
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In the popular press leadership is often depicted in a positive light, as a solution to
organizational problems and societal ills. Leadership scholars, however, are increasingly
expressing interest in the role of leaders in organizational and moral failure. Leadership does not
always result in positive outcomes despite a penchant to view the subject in aspirational terms.
Sydney Finkelstein (2003) identified patterns of chief executive officer behavior that led to
massive corporate failures. Finkelstein would likely agree with Conger’s assertion in “The Dark
Side of Leadership” that, “The very qualities that distinguish the visionary leader contained the
potential for disaster” (1990, p. 44). A recent edited book by Schyns and Hansbrough (2010)
entitled When Leadership Goes Wrong contained a collection of useful essays addressing
destructive, and unethical leadership. Kellerman (2004) asserted that, “To deny bad leadership
equivalence in the conversation and curriculum is misguided, tantamount to a medical school
that would claim to teach medicine while ignoring disease” (p. 11). Lipmen-Blumen (2005)
explored the relationship between toxic leaders and their seemingly entranced followers,
suggesting that psychosocial forces and our anxieties over ambiguity sometimes drive us to
tolerate and even prefer destructive leaders. Literature on followership (Chaleff 2009; Hopper,
2008, Riggio, Chaleff & Lipman-Blumen) suggests that courageous followers who take up their
own moral agency serve important roles in militating against bad leadership. These themes are
consistent with the notion of administrative evil as proffered by Adams and Balfour and provide
some disciplinary context for the concept that is helpful in bridging public administration and
leadership studies.
Administrative evil is not an ethical theory in the sense that it does not provide guidelines
or principles for moral reasoning. It is more the recognition of a phenomenon or pattern of
behavior that has some profound ethical implications for the morally aware leadership
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practitioner. If Adams and Balfour are correct about the prevalence of administrative evil in
contemporary organizational life then those far beyond their target audience of public
administrators have their work cut out for them.
While the notion of administrative evil has obtained some traction, it is not without critics
even within the field of public administration. At a national conference several years ago I was
honored to serve on a featured panel with Adams and Balfour where we looked at detainee abuse
at Abu Ghraib Central Prison through the lens of administrative evil. We were surprised and
flattered to hear that a formidable scholar and one of the founders of the field of the policy
sciences asked to serve as the discussant for our panel. That virtually assured a packed house for
the event. In short he excoriated the concept, largely because of its critique of technical
rationality and the suggestion that such a mindset served to dim our moral sensitivities. He
clearly saw technical rationality not as a culprit but as a solution. This should not have surprised
us when we consider that the great project of public administration and policy science, at least in
its early years, was to bring more science and rationality to the messy field of politics and policy
making. Our argument was essentially flying in the face of his lifetime of work and the
orthodoxy of the field.
In the remainder of this essay I will explain some of the concepts that are central to a
deeper understanding of the notion, with emphasis on evil and unmasking; suggest some
implications for leadership study as well as ethical practice; and conclude with questions that are
intended to fuel additional scholarship on the topic.
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The Rhetoric of Evil
Evil is admittedly a strong word with religious overtones, but central to the concept is the
unjustified harm to, and sometimes destruction of innocent human beings. It connotes unjust
outcomes that involve pain and suffering. As one of the reviewers of an earlier draft of this paper
helpfully pointed out, many academics are uncomfortable with the notion of evil. Adams
recognizes this when he notes in a recent article:
The word ‘evil’ may strike many as strong language, perhaps too strong. Indeed, evil is
still not a widely used term in social science. Social scientists have long preferred to
describe behavior, avoiding ethically loaded or judgmental rubrics—to say nothing of a
word with a long tradition as a religious term. (2011, p. 276)
Such circumspection is understandable in light of the increasing use hyperbolic discourse
in public settings, something that Bernstein (2002, 2005) described as “evil talk.” We see this
most prominently in President George H.W. Bush’s reference to Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as
an “Axis of Evil” in his January 29, 2002 state of the union address. The rhetoric of evil has a
long lineage in the field of international relations. Casebeer (2004) provided a helpful
exploration of the etymology and contemporary uses of the term. He suggested that “most
everyone can agree that it is an evaluative concept: to label and thing as evil is to judge it to be
prima facie bad” (p. 443). There are a number of reasons to invoke evil as a rhetorical tool, and
some of them are disingenuous. As Casebeer points out, some uses “may be a prelude to the
dehumanization of an opponent whose very humanity we should instead be seeking to reaffirm”
(p. 449). Academics rightly have issues with the over the top nature of rhetorical uses of evil. It
is a concept that begs for deconstruction. In order to get to evil, we also have to come to terms
with some culturally imbedded and relative foundational concepts like right and wrong. Despite
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the debatable aspects of the term “evil” and its widespread misuse, it does seem to be an apt
description of the calculated murder of six million people; the starting point for Adams and
Balfour’s analysis. The Holocaust seems to fit even Card’s rather conservative definition of evil
as harm that is aggravated, supported or produced by culpable wrongdoing (Card, 2002, p. 5).
Adams and Balfour see evil as existing on a continuum that extends from horrible mass
eruptions of inhumanity such as the Holocaust at one extreme, and the relatively benign white lie
on the other. Somewhere along this continuum wrong becomes evil– where there is real harm to
real people who may be completely undeserving of such a fate. Thinking about evil along a
continuum makes sense since we know that extreme destructiveness typically comes after a
series of intermediate steps; a slide down the proverbial slippery slope that includes the gradual
escalation of wrongness (Staub, E., 1992). Adams and Balfour do not point out where the
innocuous becomes bad and bad becomes evil. That may be a point that defies accurate
description. Perhaps evil fits the test that Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart used to describe
pornography in Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964) when he said, “I know it when I see it.” Adams and
Balour merely suggest the spectrum as a way of connecting the average individual to a concept
we normally try to distance ourselves from.
The use of a continuum is useful since the authors seek to enlighten the average public
servant to their potential role in the perpetration of evil. Our natural tendency may be to distance
ourselves from something so diabolical and monstrous as evil. The very power in the term tends
to exclude normal people from such a description. It is a mistake, however, to relegate those who
foster evil to the fringe of humanity and thereby eliminate our responsibility for actions in the
mainstream that nurture its existence.1 We may not be able to accept the idea that we would
willingly assist in an act of mass murder, but nearly all of us can relate to small wrongs such as
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little lies of marketing or playing the games and engaging the inevitable compromises associated
with achieving success in an organizational context. It is the modern organizational context itself
and the complexity of it that contributes to the second key concept—masking.
Masking occurs when the negative impact of an endeavor is fully known to but a few.
Such ignorance of effect is an important difference between administrative evil and outright or
abject evil. Masking is exacerbated when organizational distance is established; when
accountability for individual actions becomes diffused. Since emphasis on task delineation and
specialized functions are building blocks for modern organizations we can see why technical
rationality became a culprit in Adams and Balfour’s project. Administrative evil puts the locus of
control at the organizational level and as a result “no one has to accept an overt invitation to
commit an evil act, because such invitations are almost never made” (Adams, 2011, p. 277).
Unmasking occurs when the harmful effects and full scope of the wrong becomes widely
known and the evil is named. Once the downstream negative impact reaches the consciousness
of the broader public, actions that appeared routine and respectable appear in retrospect as
morally questionable. As an example we might consider the bus driver who, at the instruction of
his government employer, picks up groups of people and drives them to a specified location. The
driver may pride himself on punctuality and his mastery of various routes that get his passengers
to the destination safely and efficiently. He might be lauded for his knowledge of bus
maintenance practices that keep the bus running despite a shortage of spare parts. He might even
be admired for his many years of service without tardiness or absence. The bus driver is merely
doing his job and doing it well. Our perception of the driver may change, however, if we learn
that his bus is transporting political prisoners from a detention facility to their place of execution.
The driver might not have known about the ultimate fate of his passengers since he is far
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removed from those who are abjectly evil and who concocted the plan with both full knowledge
and malevolent intent. When the evil is unmasked the morally intelligent individual is called to
question their role in the larger system (Lennick, D. & Kiel F., 2008). Thus unmasking appears
as a major antidote to massive outbreaks of evil, in part, because it places the locus of control
back into the hands of the individual.
As with our case of the hypothetical bus driver the classic example of administrative evil
stems from an examination of the role of the German civil service in the perpetration of the
Holocaust. The act of genocide requires many players, some of whom are witting and others who
may be unwitting. Those who devised and conducted the “final solution” can be appropriately
described as abjectly evil. But there are also many other administrative activities that are part and
parcel of the operation of civil government that facilitated the conduct of the Holocaust, arguably
without harmful intent. “Ordinary Germans fulfilling ordinary roles carried out extraordinary
destruction in ways that were successfully packaged as normal and appropriate—a classic moral
inversion” (Adams, Balfour, & Reed, 2006, p. 682). As an example, consider this chilling
account that Adams and Balfour include on page 48-49:
Jews were transported out of Germany and other European countries to the death camps,
a process that stripped them of all legal protections and allowed the Nazis to execute
them at a distance form major population centers. But bureaucratic procedure had to be
followed, and this dictated that no agency, including the Gestapo or SS, could just use the
trains as they saw fit. The German Rail Authority derived its revenue from individual
clients or organizations requiring space on its trains. The client for the trains to the death
camps was the Gestapo. The travelers were Jews. The fare, payable by Gestapo officers,
was calculated at the passenger rate, third class, for the number of track kilometers, one
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way only, with discounts for children. Group rates were applied to transports exceeding
400 individuals. For the guards, the round trip fare had to be paid (Hillberg, 1989, 129131).
Moral inversions occur when bad becomes good. As an example, consider the following
logic: We need to gather intelligence so actions that further the collection of intelligence are
good. Detainees who are uncomfortable and sleep deprived are more likely to provide
information than those who are alert and comfortable. Therefore, actions to “soften up” detainees
for interrogation are good. Of course we recognize this as the flawed logic that contributed to the
shameful abuse of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison facility, a case that was added to the third
edition of Unmasking Administrative Evil.
The systematic abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib Central prison burst upon the
consciousness of the world after a 60 Minutes II report in April 28, followed closely by an article
in The New Yorker by Semour Hersh on May 10, 2004. Incontrovertible evidence including
photographs and videos taken by the soldiers themselves showed that something had gone
terribly wrong during the midnight shift at Tier One of the prison. Military police, who were
responsible for maintaining the custody of detainees, were seen gleefully punching and kicking
detainees and inmates were stripped naked and posed in humiliating ways. The six soldiers that
were charged with criminal offenses stemming from the abuse maintained that they were merely
following the orders of military intelligence officials who wanted the guards to set the conditions
for interrogations (Hersh). A flurry of investigations followed including one by Major General
Anthony Taguba who later told the Senate Arms Services Committee that he found no evidence
of a policy or order that directed the soldiers to torture or humiliate inmates. Yet that is what this
particular system produced. The excesses at Abu Ghraib fit the definition of evil since the
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perpetrators knowingly inflicted degradation, humiliation, pain and suffering on other human
beings (Adams and Balfour, 2004). Philip Zimbardo, the principle investigator of the famous
Stanford prison experiment, testified as an expert witness for the defense at the court martial of
the noncommissioned officer in charge of the night shift at Abu Ghraib asserting that the guards
“were ‘good apples,’ some of whom became soured over time by powerful situational forces”
(Zimbardo, 2007, p. 329).
There were certainly some members of the German civil service who fully recognized the
consequences of their behavior during the Holocaust, and who mistakenly justified their actions
as in the interest of the greater good. Yet we must also acknowledge the possibility that some did
not. It is often with the “peripheral player” that the description of administrative evil best applies.
Back to our Abu Ghraib example, the culpability of the perpetrators of abuse during the midnight
shift is clear. But how do we regard the medical personnel who treated injuries that were prima
facie evidence of detainee abuse? Surely the attending health care professionals had to have seen
injuries that indicated something was seriously wrong. There is evidence that they acted within
established professional convention and both treated such injuries and duly noted them in
medical records. Who would consider their actions as anything but appropriate at the time? Once
the full scope of the extent of abuse became public the limited actions of medical personnel were
considered by many to be morally questionable. Similarly questionable were the actions of those
who had some level of knowledge about what was going on, but deemed it none of their business
or “not my job.” After the unmasking we are also in a better position to examine the role of those
in positions of responsibility who pushed for more intelligence and authorized enhanced
interrogation methods. Adams suggests that once the painful truth is observed and people begin
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to assert, “They should have known,” the actors are confronted with guilt and shame (Adams,
2011).
This in turn becomes a powerful psychological incentive to deny the harm or evil. If the
wrongdoing or evil stems from management, such denial is likely to be read by those
lower in the organization as sufficient direction to collude in a cover-up or lie.
Apprehension over the possible loss of one’s job is often sufficient incentive for
collusion. (p. 283)
Otherwise conscientious and morally sensitive peripheral players are likely to continue
their actions in support of an evil producing processes so long as the downstream effects of their
actions remain masked. “I was just doing my job” provides only so much moral cover. Only the
shallowest and most emotionally stunted of individuals lack the moral sensitivity to voluntarily,
knowingly, and eagerly participate in evil acts. We might argue that Adolph Eichmann was such
a person since his excuse for actions as the architect of the Holocaust centered on an assertion
that he was simply doing what he had to do to be promoted. This led author Hanna Arendt
(1963) to coin the term “banality of evil.” Eichmann was not a psychopath or lunatic. Arendt
observed that he was actually a strikingly ordinary fellow who operated disturbingly “at a surface
level of consciousness and morality, failing to admit to the full implications of one’s actions”
(Adams, Balfour & Reed, p. 683).
Applicability of the concept beyond Public Administration?
At this point we might reasonably question the applicability of the notion of
administrative evil to contexts beyond public administration although Adams and Balfour clearly
indicate that the concept is not limited to that field. Do the patterns of thinking and behavior that
permit or foster the occurrence of administrative evil exist in the corporate, nonprofit, and other
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sectors? This is a particularly good topic for discussion for a higher education seminar.
Understanding that narrowly defined roles, excessive compartmentalization, and a lack of moral
sensitivity are all part of the recipe that leads to administrative evil, we might begin with an
examination of the degree to which these elements are present or absent in a particular context.
In a business ethics course graduate students were asked to provide their thoughts as to
whether administrative evil is a problem for business entities. After two years of classes and
hundreds discussions we have yet to hear an argument that administrative evil does not apply to
the corporate sector. To the contrary, many have asserted quite cogently that the field of business
with its narrow focus on profit maximization and short-term perspective is even more susceptible
to administrative evil than the public sector.
In their recent documentary film The Corporation Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott, and
Joel Bakan (2005) provide a stinging critique of contemporary business practices by comparing
the characteristics of the modern global corporation to those of a psychopath (Achbar, M.,
Abbot, M. & Bakan, J., 2005). When we consider some of the greatest contemporary business
failures of our time such as those experienced by Enron, Arthur Andersen, Tyco, and WorldCom
it is not hard to identify evidence of administrative evil.2
As a particularly salient example consider the well-documented and disturbing case of the
Enron Corporation as chronicled in The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and
Scandalous Fall of Enron (McLean, B. & Elkind, P., 2003). Once considered “the coolest
company in America” (p. 410), the story of the eventual bankruptcy of the iconic energy,
commodities and services company has the elements of abject and administrative evil. For abject
evil we can look to the executives of the company such as the late Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling and
Andy Fastow who masterminded creative accounting approaches and essentially ran a scam on
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Wall Street that permitted them to amass vast fortunes from a financial deck of cards. For
evidence of harm consider the suicide of former Enron executive Cliff Baxter and the thousands
of employees who lost their jobs as well as investors who suffered the loss of over ten billion
dollars (p. 412). The ramifications of the collapse of Enron cascaded through the economy of
Houston and the entire energy industry. Not everyone who worked at Enron was complicit in
fraud, but Enron could surely not have operated without the help of myriad clerks, accountants,
traders, and employees. How do we consider their efforts form a moral perspective? There is
little to hold most of the hard working employees accountable for before the evil was unmasked.
Perhaps some of them should have known had they looked harder, but there was little incentive
to do so and people in that category become fewer as we move farther away from the executive
suite. Once the extent of corporate misconduct became public knowledge and the evil was
unmasked every person in the company, as individual moral agents, were left to question their
continuing association with Enron.
Who should do the unmasking?
Adams and Balfour place the onus for unmasking administrative evil squarely on the
shoulders of the public administrator who has the organizational status, power, and perspective
to comprehend the implications of their organizations’ activities. Their position near the top of
the organizational pyramid provides them with a place from which they can observe the
downstream effects of their enterprise, and intervene when they find administrative evil. They
call for public administrators who are morally aware and not merely amoral conduits of authority
(Adams & Balfour, 2009a). Leadership studies scholars might want to substitute leaders for the
word public administrators. Little is lost in that translation. I submit that we can extend their
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argument even further by stating that it is incumbent upon a larger group of people within and
beyond authoritative positions to be on the lookout for administrative evil. It is not only the
responsibility of public administrators to guard against the occurrence of administrative evil; the
responsibility rightly extends to all of those that serve the larger system.
It would be useful to debate the notion that the responsibility for preventing or unmasking
administrative evil rests predominately with those in authoritative positions. We can certainly
acknowledge that those in high places have the best view, while liberalizing the unmasking
process to include those beyond the top of the hierarchy. It seems self-evident that an
organization that has robust mechanisms for transmitting suspicions about administrative evil to
receptive and morally sensitive authority figures has a greater likelihood of mitigating its impact.
Liberalizing the responsibility for unmasking beyond those in formal leadership roles is also in
keeping with concepts of individual moral agency that extend to ancient Greek philosophies as
extolled by the likes of Plato and Aristotle.
Expanding the responsibility to unmask and respond in the face of evil is consistent with
the late Joseph C. Rost’s argument against dichotomizing the leadership process into two roles:
leaders and followers (2008, pp. 53-64). He was concerned that followership infers a passive
receptivity to leaders. Instead he favored a shared vision of leadership where influence flows two
ways in a dynamic and episodic nature. He was fond of asking the question, “Who would ever
aspire to grow up to become a follower?” He favored the term collaborators over leaders and
followers to reflect the free flow of influence that takes place in his version of the process of
leadership. This perspective clearly places greater demands on those outside of authoritative
positions.
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How might we prevent outbreaks of administrative evil?
It almost seems trite to suggest that an antidote for administrative evil rests with training
and education on the mechanisms of administrative evil through the academy and other outlets of
professional development. I have been known to quip that in some organizations, such as the
military, there are only two default solutions to any problem: leadership and training. While
recognizing that there are other variables to consider the truth is that leader development and
training aren’t bad places to start. The world might be a better place if leaders at all levels
considered it among their primary responsibilities to ensure that none of their employees have
reason to look back on their association with shame or regret.
To study leadership is to engage in an inherently interdisciplinary endeavor. The
phenomenon is illuminated by a variety of disciplines and our understanding of leadership is
inevitably enriched by the application of multiple perspectives. It is therefore not surprising that
those who attempt to make sense out of ethics and leadership in organizations will observe two
distinct conversations in play without much constructive crosstalk between them. I am referring
to the varying perspectives on the drivers of ethical behavior in organizations as put forth by the
fields of ethics and psychology.
Psychologists such as Phillip Zimbardo, best known for his groundbreaking work with
the Stanford Prison Experiment, assert that psychological and social cues drive much of human
behavior. Zimbardo (2007) noted that systems and situations have great power to drive otherwise
good people to do bad things. The inference is that efforts to develop individual character are
anemic in the face of systemic pressures and the psychological and social cues that truly drive
behavior. My discussions with practicing ethicists often disclose significant discomfort with the
shift from individual accountability inherent in most moral development efforts to a nebulous
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and impersonal system. In a parody of comedian Flip Wilson’s tag line, giving such credence to
collective processes sounds a bit like, “The system made me do it.” It is a significant departure
from the ethical project of developing the excellent person and less than gratifying from an
accountability perspective.
The concept of administrative evil provides some utility in bridging the two discussions.
Note that Zimbardo provided a thoughtful foreword to the third edition of Unmasking
Administrative Evil. Adams and Balfour recognized the power of the situation that rests within
human social systems and saw this phenomenon as central driver of administrative evil. They are
related concepts, but while Zimbardo is interested in the reasons why good people turn bad,
Adams and Balfour are interested in how ordinary people can facilitate evil as part of their
professional roles without being aware that they are doing anything wrong. Adams considers
organizations the “home base” of administrative evil by facilitating wrongdoing and evil both
internally and externally (2011, p. 282). It is this very realization that initiates a moral
imperative: If we accept that the complex organizational structures of modern life and the
prevalent mindset of technical rationality are more likely than not to produce systems that harm
people, then don’t we have an obligation to look for the harm and unmask it? Having unmasked
the evil responsible moral agents are then in a position to evaluate their continued support of the
system. In some cases they will be obligated not only to refrain from participation, but to actively
work to counter the evil of the organization.
It is in the retrospective nature of Administrative evil that a potential critique resides. It
may well be that it is easy to identify administrative evil in actions that have transpired, and
devilishly hard to identify it as events unfold. Administrative evil can be identified as an active
phenomenon in almost any pubic debacle. In addition to the examples already described in this
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paper, Adams and Balfour (2007) have used administrative evil as a means of explaining the
Challenger Disaster, Operation Paperclip that shielded German war criminals from justice after
World War II, and the inadequate governmental response to Hurricane Katrina. The Challenger
Disaster is a case where abject evil in the form of intentional harm is virtually absent, yet
engineers who knew of the potential failure of the o-rings at colder temperatures were unable to
effectively move that information to impact a launch decision resulting in the death of a gallant
group of astronauts. The organizational culture at the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration and perhaps groupthink contributed to the masking. Thus the potential for evil
remained unnamed until after the catastrophic failure and subsequent investigation. In retrospect
the actions of many technicians, who were otherwise just doing their jobs, were called into
question. In the case of Operation Paperclip, U.S. officials engaged in a process of spiriting
away German scientists who were also war criminals and intentionally diminished their roles in
atrocities to facilitate the space race and to win the cold war. Justice denied was the wrongdoing
in that case, yet the intelligence officers and officials involved in that process were otherwise
loyal Americans. It would be difficult to give them the face of evil. Only in retrospect as the
extent of the atrocities at places like the Peenemunde rocket research center (where the V-2
rocket was developed) became public did the actions of those officials come into question. The
case of the inadequate governmental response to Hurricane Katrina and the widespread suffering
that followed prompted Adams and Balfour to ask whether acts of incompetence are unethical or
fit the definition of administrative evil (Adams & Balfour, 2009b). They also examined the
failures of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq for evidence of administrative evil. While
they found misuse of political appointments, deskilling of federal agencies, and significant
privation, they stopped short of levying a charge of administrative evil leaving it to history to
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decide. I suspect that the recent disastrous oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico will add additional grist
for their mill.
If administrative evil is only identified in the rearview mirror then the concept is not that
useful for the leadership practitioner. When scholars identify not only ex post facto indicators of
administrative evil but also the precursors and indicators that it may be unfolding we will have a
substantive contribution to leadership practice. As an example, consider the work of Irving Janis
(1971) as he not only explained the concept of groupthink, but also provided symptoms whereby
its presence in a particular group might be diagnosed. He then provided some practical advice as
to how groupthink might be avoided.
Can the behavioral sciences contribute empirically to our understanding of administrative
evil?
There is currently no existing measure or scale for the assessment of administrative evil.
Perhaps components of existing ethical climate surveys augmented with questions specific to the
concept would be a contribution. Determining that an organization is particularly susceptible to
administrative evil or providing tools to help increase moral sensitivity and even aid in
unmasking seem like fruitful endeavors.
Additional experimentation to identify situations in which individuals are more or less
likely to participate in administrative evil might be useful. The extent to which national and
organizational culture or climate play a role would also be interesting. Are there personality
types or environmental factors that serve to militate against administrative evil?
The rise of a new concept at the crossroads of ethics and leadership opens many new
questions beyond those explored in this paper. If this brief exploration incites additional research
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and dialogue on the topic then it will have served its intended purpose. Given the prevalence of
man-made catastrophes additional interdisciplinary focus on both the intended and unintended
consequences of modern life ought to be a priority for behavioral scientists and especially for
scholars of leadership.
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Notes
1
I wish to acknowledge Abby Ferber’s research on hate groups for this idea. She argues that it is
a mistake to relegate organized hate groups to the outer fringes of society and thereby distance us
from mainstream actions that give them rise. As an example of her wide-ranging work on the
subject see Ferber, A. (1998). White man falling: Race, gender and white supremacy. Lanham,
MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
2
For an enlightening look at the patterns of corporate failure see Finkelstein, S. (2003). Why
smart executives fail. New York: Penguin.
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References
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