That’s the thing about organizations. They enable/empower/impel people to act out intrinsically evil or at least enormously inconsiderate behavior like that shown to Jaymee. Organizations aren’t made up of people. They are made up of roles - sets of behaviors required or expected by others to be carried out by individuals in a particular position in the organization’s hierarchical structure. Many of the expectations attached to organizational roles aren’t things that most people would be prepared to do if they were acting as themselves.

People usually find it easy to slip into roles, because we’re socialized almost from birth to think of ourselves as many different kinds of things. We are usually strongly discouraged from letting one role bleed over into the others - or letting what we’d think of as our best and most core self from bleeding over into any role. That’s what makes it possible for people to behave in as beastly a fashion as shown here by the supervisors and still go home and think of themselves as worthwhile and moral human beings.

In the long run, trying to enact a role strikingly at odds with your own self-definition takes a significant toll on anyone. You have to live with yourself, and there’s a limit on how long you can live with a person whose behavior violates your own standards. Of course, some people have more ability than others to set themselves off from their roles, and to tolerate the conflicts; these are the folks who generally rise up corporate ladders and wind up running things.

I got into studying organizations 40 years ago because I was amazed at the capacity of people whom I knew to be good and smart to do bad and dumb things while in their organizational roles. All these years later, I’m still amazed.