Visty Banaji
The Great Reciprocation: Loyalty is a two-way street
The road less travelled
In recent times, loyalty has gone from being a prized characteristic of the model employee to an antiquated appendage that prevents the free flow of human capital. What have we lost in the process?
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tures are plain for all to see. What’s frequently missing in all the exit drama is the equivalent of the disloyal partner’s guilt. This column attempts to provide it.
From cooperation to loyalty
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s he lay dying from a dagger wound, a man confided to his wife, "I cannot die without telling you the truth. I cheated on you throughout our marriage. All those nights when I told you I was working late, I was being unfaithful. And this year I had made up my mind to abandon you." She looked at him calmly and said, "Don’t fret now. Who do you think stabbed you in the back?" I apologize for altering a joke so old that it’s more taste-free than tasteless but | July 2022
I have been reminded of it every time there’s been a headline about the Great Resignation. Though that somewhat klutzy phrase was first used by Anthony Klotz, it seems to have become the defining problem of HR management since Covid times. Even in India, where the tragedies of the great retrenchments far outnumbered resignations, given the levels and job types that resigned, HR’s attention was hypnotized by the uncoagulating bleed. Unlike the joke, the culminating depar-
Cooperation, starting with kin and progressing to ever larger aggregations of people, was among the primary reasons for the supremacy homo sapiens acquired.1 The benefits started flowing from an early stage. "… [E]ven in foraging societies people regularly cooperate with many unrelated individuals. …[S]ocial life is regulated by shared moral systems that specify the rights and duties of individuals enforced, albeit imperfectly, by third party sanctions."2 With the passage of time, societies that perfected large-scale cooperation between greater proportions of their populations (while reducing the transactional costs through lubricants such as trust)3 came to dominate the globe.
