A drowning hand in the sea calling out for help.

Police must serve warrants and make arrests to uphold the law. Therapists must purposefully expose patients to their greatest fears (e.g., spiders, heights) to treat anxiety disorders. Bill collectors must demand money from debtors so that companies are remunerated. And doctors must tell patients to put their affairs in order because they have a terminal illness. Researchers refer to this kind of work as “necessary evils,” because it requires a person to harm others in the service of some perceived greater good. There are relatively few occupations that don’t involve carrying out necessary evils, and managers are certainly not immune.

In a recent study published in Journal of Management Inquiry, we explored how carrying out necessary evils affects those who must do the work, not just once or twice, but repeatedly — hundreds or even thousands of times.

We conducted in-depth interviews with 21 HR professionals who had carried out several downsizing events on behalf of their organizations. Participants came from companies in the Northeast U.S., a region that has experienced tens of thousands of terminations over the last two decades, according to the 2013 Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The number of people that our participants reported having laid off ranged from 20 to more than 250 individuals. They had assisted in making decisions about who to let go, in carrying out the downsizing, and in discussing the terminations with employees.

Because a major part of an HR professional’s job involves helping employees—through hiring, onboarding, providing benefit services, etc.—many participants described feeling a tension between helping and hurting others that affected them significantly. We expected that participants would experience distress, but the depth of a few participants’ sadness from carrying out layoffs surprised us; several people cried during their interview.

We found that seven stressors in particular evoked suffering: 1) having to deliver harm to others that felt unnecessary or unjustifiable, 2) feeling that necessary evils conflicted with other work obligations, beliefs, or values (such as that helping others is a primary function of HR), 3) feeling stigmatized by others (such as being referred to as “the grim reaper”), 4) feeling personally responsible for negatively impacting people’s lives, 5) being repeatedly exposed to others’ pain and suffering, 6) feeling that one couldn’t escape the work of harming others, and 7) having inadequate recovery time between difficult tasks.  These caused a number of our interviewees to feel exhausted and burned out. At least one HR manager intended to quit HR several months after our interview, specifically because she could not tolerate repeated downsizing any longer.

Yet the majority of people in our study developed coping mechanisms that helped assuage these stressors of downsizing. Though their organizations did not require it, these participants actively sought to minimize others’ pain and offered care for those directly affected. For example, they would spend extra time with someone who was especially distressed and take care to protect the privacy of those being terminated. They would also help people pack up and personally walk them out, rather than get security involved. So instead of being distant or detached, their approach was to engage with the hurt parties and to be empathetic and compassionate.

This contradicted prior research, led by our study’s lead author, where the majority of participants coped with the emotional stress of carrying out necessary evils by physically, emotionally, and cognitively withdrawing—essentially cutting themselves off from others’ pain. For example, people would hide in their offices or avoid elevators, so they wouldn’t have to interact with colleagues being laid off; they would refer to people by numbers rather than their names, when deciding whom to lay off; or they would rationalize that people being let go would have the opportunity to start fresh.

However, in the first study (where they withdrew), people weren’t repeatedly doing this work. It was a one-time event, and many of them had never carried out downsizing before. Conversely, in the current study, people had been doing this work for a long time.

These different coping strategies for stress management—engaging or withdrawing—should remind us that stress is neither predetermined nor totally out of our control.  People can prevent, reduce, and cope with stress through their beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. Compared to those who tried to limit the emotional toll of their work through avoidance, our study participants who stayed engaged and helped those in need actually ended up being more resilient over the long term. They appeared to be less emotionally overcome with the trials of repeatedly carrying out necessary evils and remained comparatively more positive and energized to make a positive contribution through their difficult work.

Of course, we can’t draw firm conclusions about causation since these were both qualitative studies, but together, our findings suggest that adopting a help-giving orientation when carrying out necessary evils at work can help those on both ends. Professionals who must carry out difficult tasks can offset their own personal distress by engaging and focusing on the part of their job that means helping others, reducing the trauma being inflicted and reinforcing their own sense of meaning, self-worth, and belief that they play an important organizational role by carrying out necessary evils.

While our work cannot answer why certain HR professionals were able to more readily focus on helping rather than hurting, our findings provide insights for all workers and organizations. Employees should understand that performing necessary evils on the job can have significant negative effects on their wellbeing. They should be trained to recognize how focusing on helping those harmed can benefit themselves and their colleagues.  Police can arrest others and maintain a dignified approach, bill collectors can avoid shaming people who are late paying bills, and doctors can deliver bad news with empathy and caring attitudes. Each can offer help in the moment and afterwards.

A long history of research shows that people who do socially intensive work that involves repeated exposure to others’ pain and suffering, such as emergency medical technicians and social workers, are at higher risk of burnout. To counteract that, workers must focus on self-care. Employees need to have guiding principles and actions that emphasize their own health and well-being.

Today’s workplace often prizes efficiency at the expense of caring, which creates a barrier to implementing a help-centered approach. However, our results suggest that this focus comes at a cost to those being harmed, the individuals who must carry out necessary evils, and ultimately to the organizations in which necessary evils work is present.

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