Moral Complexity in Leadership: Change and Conflict | Sweat, by Lynn Nottage
"Moral Complexity in Leadership" 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. These cases 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, "Change and Conflict," students will read and discuss Lynn Nottage's play Sweat, set in Reading, Pennsylvania, USA, when many factories left the area. Although layoffs and labor disputes are a fact of life in business, many leaders are blind to their far-reaching effects on people and their lives, livelihoods, and communities.
The play depicts the anger and alienation of middle- and working-class Americans whose livelihoods are threatened or destroyed by management decisions. Two young men, one white and one Black, and their mothers, long-time friends and employees at the same factory, find themselves increasingly at odds as the company decides to move the factory to Mexico. Tensions continue to rise, culminating in an event that alters the course of every character's life.
