Moral Complexity in Leadership: Moral Distress and Rationalizations "Blessed Assurance," by Allan Gurganus

The "Moral Complexity in Leadership" series of cases and teaching notes help business instructors harness the power of fiction to prepare students for the moral and ethical dilemmas they will face throughout their careers. Meaningful fiction challenges students intellectually and emotionally; it reveals the inner worlds of human players and enables learning that can be difficult to access through case studies, commentary, or reporting. Through literature, students will wrestle with the kinds of problems they will face as leaders looking to make courageous decisions aligned with their moral codes. The works in this series represent a wide range of settings, viewpoints, and cultural frameworks; the characters are complex and contradictory, and the systems within which they operate (whether family, organizational, or cultural) influence them in varied ways. They have been taught to executive, full- and part-time MBA student audiences for many years. The series aims to increase students' understanding of moral frameworks and enhance their skills in facilitating and participating in healthy and productive dialogue about complex and provocative issues. In this installment of the series, "Moral Distress and Rationalizations," students will examine Allan Gurganus's "Blessed Assurance," about a 59-year-old man named Jerry who narrates this novella by looking back on a part-time job he held when he was 19 years old, a role that still plagues him with guilt 40 years later. Working for Windlass Funerary Eventualities, Inc., his assignment was to collect weekly funeral insurance premium payments from elderly, impoverished Black people in the fictional small town of Falls, North Carolina. Windlass's practices were predatory: Customers were required to make payments every week or forfeit all compensation for their loved ones' funeral expenses, no matter how many hundreds or even thousands of dollars they had already paid. Jerry tells readers he needed the job to pay for college business courses and to help his parents, who suffered from "brown lung" (byssinosis) after working in a cotton mill for 30 years. Jerry tells the story because he still "feels bad about what went on," and his wife says, "Telling somebody might help." Moral Complexity in Leadership students have consistently found Gurganus's novella deeply resonant. Jerry's complicity in an unethical system over which he has little power and his tortured decision-making and rationalizations about whether to continue or to quit echo situations many students face. Even for those who have not yet encountered such situations, the story likely will be relevant soon.