*3.1. Moral Taint Due to Pressuring Management*

The interviews revealed stressors and effects due to pressuring management that interviewees perceived as morally tainted. Respondents expressed their interpretations of moral taint quite explicitly through negative judgments or more implicitly: facts were given and the audience was left to pass judgment. Table 5 summarizes the shared interpretations of managers and junior consultants, and gives for each of the codes their groundedness (how many quotes we could label with the same code) and an illustrative quote of both managers and juniors. It is important to note that the pressuring management style is criticized substantially more often than its negative effects.

Statements from both junior 7 and manager 12 in Table 5 indicate it is quite common in consulting to be asked to work up to 60 h a week and incidentally up to 80 h a week. This is substantially longer than the Dutch maximum of 40 h a week. For a period no longer than 16 weeks, Dutch labour law allows workers to work up till 48 h a week on average [67], but consultants are asked to work much longer. Because of projects with overlapping deadlines, pressuring managers and demanding clients, junior 11 (Table 5) compares his work environment to that of a "pressure cooker", suggesting the pressures are far from comfortable. Of all dirty leadership pressures, required work hours are criticized most by the juniors, and managers admit the pressures are as high as the juniors indicate. It makes the management style morally tainted; for instance, junior 10 said (laughs while looking at cartoon 1), "This is anonymous? Yes, this applies to my manager! This is quite bad indeed. But I need to add some nuance. I recognize this, but it is also something I want to do. I chose to work the 60, 70, 80 h. And I seek challenges, new clients, personal development, etc. This works bi-directional."

While the pressures mentioned above can also be attributed to the work context, and not only to the manager, juniors specifically mention the formal distance they can feel between themselves and their demanding managers. When facing difficulties, juniors can feel "ashamed" for opening up, sensing it is better not to "lose face" by admitting they struggle with the work pressures (see junior 4 in Table 4). Managers recognize the experience of this distance (like manager 3 in Table 4) and admit "you often discover it (overload struggles) later than their direct environment".

Related to this is the focus on results. Consulting firms are organized around meeting productivity and sales targets, causing managers to be primarily concerned with the productivity aspect of their juniors' performances, and the cost of their juniors' wellbeing. As a result, juniors criticize the aspect of being treated as a source of profit. Junior 10 (Table 5) explains it is key that the "client is happy", and feels that it is a "dangerous criterion", as it can push you too far. Managers confirm this, and admit that "consulting is a hard environment" (manager 9), which adds to the list of morally dirty aspects in the leadership style.


**Table 5.** Management-induced pressures perceived as morally tainted.

Tot = Total; Jr = Junior consultant; M = Manager.

The juniors and managers not only criticize the moral dirtiness of the cold management style with the focus on results and low tolerance for personal failure. To a lesser extent, they also criticize the immoral effects of such high pressures. Burnout is mentioned most often, and also qualified as the most negative consequence. Manager 3 (Table 5) indicates that increasingly young colleagues suffer from burnout. In addition, junior 10 admitted that she had suffered from a burnout herself. Although we cannot quantify based on our interview data, literature on consultants does indicate a high prevalence of burnout, stress and related psychological problems among consultants, in line with our findings [17,19,20,56].

Some workers, rather than having a burnout, share that they become mentally imbalanced, feel depressed, or have negative emotions. The quote from manager 5 in Table 5 illustrates how stress reduced his performance and work satisfaction. At times that too many stressors escalated "you couldn't care less about performance", a finding also observed by Espeland [68] (see p. 180).

A related effect criticized by our interviewees is the high turnover rate among juniors. It is seen as response to the extreme demands they face. The quotes from manager 12 and junior 11 in Table 5 indicate this, as you "cannot let juniors work that many hours" (manager 12). "They will ask if this is the right job for them, and then they leave." (junior 11). These critiques again indicate dirty leadership, and question the sustainability of the work for juniors.

Juniors and consultant managers are surprisingly aligned in their judgements of when and where their occupation crosses the borders of acceptable work demands. They clearly articulate which leadership pressures and effects are unacceptable against the norms and laws in society. These internalized critical social judgements give stress, as discussed in the dirty work literature, in addition to the work pressures themselves. Therefore, the motivation to normalize an experience of moral taint will be higher, the more conscious you are about the critical public and peer judgements. Both the juniors might normalize (they do not like to be seen as a victim) as well as the pressuring managers (who do not like to be seen as over-demanding).
