Rob Dobi
What’s wrong with loyalty? Isn’t it a virtue to display steadfast allegiance to something or someone other than oneself? After all, loyalty has been celebrated as a virtue across many cultures for millennia.
As economic headwinds and a tough job market appear to be empowering more authoritarian styles of leadership, it’s a good time to look more closely at loyalty. We must ask whether good leaders can fairly demand it of their followers and whether it’s an idea that modern management should finally discard.
Two recent high-profile examples illustrate just how problematic an emphasis on loyalty can be.
Staffers loyal to former U.S. President Joe Biden allegedly concealed troubling signs of the aging leader’s cognitive decline before his poor performance in a June 2024 televised debate against then-candidate Donald Trump. The public reaction to the event led the incumbent to withdraw from the presidential race, long after it was feasible for his party to engage in an open process for nominating another candidate.1
That election was won by a man who has made loyalty a central organizing principle of his leadership, at times demanding personal allegiance from those in his administration and reportedly subjecting candidates for senior roles to “loyalty tests.”2 Any sign of disagreement with President Trump is recast as betrayal, and those perceived as insufficiently loyal are sidelined or removed, even when their job performance or policy alignment is not the primary issue. Conversely, notably problematic performance and actions themselves may go unchallenged, as long as unwavering allegiance is maintained.
Loyalty, enacted in this manner, is not about shared commitment to a broader purpose or principle rather than to an individual. In practice, loyalty is often a measure of personal fealty, with silence and compliance positive indicators of commitment. When organizational scandals are exposed, it’s not uncommon to find that coverups of abuse, financial irregularities, and other forms of corporate malfeasance were rationalized as acts of loyalty to the institution or allegiance to a leader.
The Problem With Loyalty
Many readers likely have personally experienced these less admirable kinds of loyalty. Whether it’s “looking the other way,” “omitting all the facts,” or a host of other forms of ignoring or distorting the (ethical) reality of a situation, people commonly use the noble language of loyalty rather than the condemning language of fear, greed, and other types of self-preservation or self-interest. Broader history, likewise, shows that the word loyalty is commonly used in descriptions of the most corrupt regimes and destructive ideologies — where people have committed themselves to, colluded with, or enabled some of the worst actors in history out of fear, nationalism, or blind allegiance.
Loyalty is inherently about partiality; that is, it prioritizes some purpose, person, or group’s interests above others.3 In the context of work, loyalty means promoting the well-being of or preventing harm to a particular group of people or an organizational objective, even if it involves disregard for or harm to other people or purposes. Consider the manager who proudly recruits and promotes people from their college alma mater without considering how this affects potentially stronger candidates from elsewhere, or a subordinate who is fiercely committed to their manager because it benefits them personally, not because they’re both putting the organization’s mission first.
Loyalty is thus a conditional virtue: It might serve the pursuit of universal principles like justice or compassion, or it might serve much less noble things. Actions deemed loyal can, in short, be moral, amoral, or downright immoral. Covering up an in-group member’s unethical behavior because it also benefits you to do so might be described as loyal, but it’s still unethical. Similarly, it’s hard to be impressed by the morality of salespeople’s loyalty to their company when they use sales tactics to maximize their own income at the expense of customers. So does the term really reflect something to be proud of, or is it a nice-sounding way to deflect attention away from the harm being done or the self-interest of the actor? It’s certainly easier, after all, to say we’re “being loyal to the company” than to say that we’re “screwing customers,” or to say we’re “loyal to the boss” rather than that we’re “complicit in covering up abuse.”
Our goal, thus, is not to try to redeem the inherently problematic concept of loyalty. In work contexts, its usage has become so skewed toward the unadmirable that it’s not worth trying to salvage. Furthermore, decades of rightsizing and reorgs have made it abundantly clear that workplace loyalty is too often a one-way street. Research discussed in Sloan Management Review nearly 30 years ago pointed to the breakdown of a social contract under which employees could expect that their loyalty to the company would be reciprocated.4 In a recent survey, fewer than one-quarter of U.S. employees reported strong trust in their leadership or the belief that their organization cares about their well-being.5 The cynicism (or realism) of the majority was validated quite explicitly in August 2025, when AT&T CEO John Stankey fired off a frank memo in response to an employment engagement survey.6 In the memo, he addressed those who may have expected an “ ‘employment deal’ rooted in loyalty,” writing that the company had “consciously shifted away from some of these elements.”
Postures such as Stankey’s are strengthened by a difficult job market in which employees have few alternatives and authoritarian leadership styles are on the rise. The shift toward transactional work exchanges grounded in fear is well underway. Executives may label employees who challenge them in any way, or who try to maintain work-life boundaries, as “disloyal,” diminishing their career prospects. When loyalty means “having my back no matter what,” “sticking to the party line,” “not contradicting me in public,” and “making me look good,” workers may comply, but with an inevitable cynicism that looks nothing like the healthy employee engagement that organizations need in order to thrive. Similarly, when workers recognize that they are in a culture where it’s not what you know or contribute but who you know and what you do for them that gets you ahead, they may default to fawning and sycophantic behavior. Under those circumstances, it’s hard to imagine the organization itself is optimizing performance.
You may be thinking that the problems we’ve described are merely distortions of loyalty, not a problem with the notion of loyalty itself. You can probably readily think of workplace situations where the label of loyalty is applied to what seems like admirable behavior; situations where people remain committed to a mission and set of core values amid external challenges that would make drift toward personal comfort, safety, or short-term profit maximization easy to rationalize. That’s why we often associate the word loyalty with extraordinary effort, sacrifice, and resilience and claim it as a force behind necessary revo
