All people have many interests, things to which they feel they belong and their loyalty. However, there are times when several items of loyalty do not agree but rather conflict with each other. Such a process from the point of view of a person committed to both of them is called a conflict of loyalties. Conflicting loyalties may arise when a person is faced with the fact that his professional duties overlap with another area of activity or as a result of corruption. Understanding conflicting loyalties is just as important as actual conflicts.
The topic of conflicting loyalties can resonate with me because of its relevance since people face it within their workplace. A frequent occurrence is the bribery of officials, a typical example of a conflict of interest when a person puts their interests above their duties. The second important aspect can be developments in the technology sector. Some companies deliberately delay innovations in order to stretch the process of their release and get more benefits. Another critical point can be called Financial audits in large companies. They can also be conducted biased because people involved in the audit process face conflicts due to their involvement in the audited organization.
The most prominent examples of conflicting loyalties are shareholding, employment processes, wage negotiations, and patenting inventions. If conflicting loyalties and their consequences are made public, this can negatively affect the credibility of the involved authors of any materials. Personal beliefs and competition in a certain area can also cause a conflict of interest. The integral component of conflicting loyalties is the influence of the interest of any private person in power on good faith decision-making. Private interest can influence the objectivity or impartiality of decision-making, the execution or non-execution of actions only during the exercise of discretionary official or representative powers.
Loyalty is a complex, multifaceted phenomenon. Each consumer has four main types of resources: temporal, material, cognitive and affective. The main desire of the buyer is to buy the product they need with the most negligible loss of valuable resources for, and not just faster, cheaper, and easier. From the service provider perspective, “Loyalty to clients takes precedence over loyalty to colleagues and employers” (Ylvisaker & Rugkåsa, 2022, p. 651). Qualitative satisfaction of the main desire of the consumer generates loyalty.
Increasing customer loyalty is an essential strategic task of any organization. The effectiveness of developed and implemented programs to attract and ensure client satisfaction is the basis of marketing the relationship between the organization and the consumer of services.
A prevalent cause of conflicts of loyalty is when considering a decision, the person or body that deals with this issue is influenced by the company whose issue they need to consider. This influence can manifest itself in different ways, and it can be both pressure and belonging of a person in some way to this organization. Such involvement may be formal or informal. In some cases, there may be no conflict of allegiance because the organizations with which the person is associated will have one goal. In such cases, there is no need to remove this body or person from solving the task since his involvement never affects the result. Resignation in such a case can be justified only because of censure by the public to preserve the organization’s image. As Velasco (2018, p. 1037) states, “Directors are expected to act in the interests of the corporation and its shareholders, rather than in their own interests.” Often, for the most objective decisions, directors are recommended to be removed from the assessment of the organization because their interests may go beyond the company’s.
Sometimes, conflicts of loyalty are complicated to recognize. For an objective assessment, a separate independent structure can be involved that assesses the possibility of conflicting loyalties. As already indicated above, in some cases, third parties with whom the manager has loyalty may have similar interests to the company. In this case, it is only possible to improve specific directions in alliance with persons having the same interests.
References
Velasco, J. (2018). The diminishing duty of loyalty. Wash. & Lee L. Rev., 75, 1035.
Ylvisaker, S., & Rugkåsa, M. (2022). Dilemmas and conflicting pressures in social work practice. European Journal of Social Work, 25(4), 643-654.