Benevolence: the New, Overused Emblem of the Relational Ideal

On LinkedIn or in the workplace, everyone proclaims themselves a Jedi Master of benevolence. The word is everywhere: in management training, in HR slogans, in the polished posts of social media. But the mask quickly falls once you learn to detect the dissonances.

When Benevolence Becomes a Tool of Control

The recent history of managerial practices shows how organizations capture humanistic notions and integrate them into their performance logics. Boltanski and Chiapello (1999), in The New Spirit of Capitalism, had already shown how managerial discourse reinvents critical values (authenticity, creativity, cooperation) to better legitimize the economic order. Benevolence follows the same trajectory: presented as a relational value, it actually becomes an instrument of conformity and control.

In practice, pseudo-benevolence is revealed quite visibly in exchanges through:

• personal attacks disguised as “feedback,”

• insults dressed up as poetic metaphors,

• gratuitous devaluation under the cover of “reframing,”

• the self-appointment of some as the “benevolence police.”

Responding eloquently to a gratuitous attack is not a lack of benevolence. Protesting against unfounded humiliation is not a lack of benevolence. The real distortion lies in reducing this notion to a façade, serving primarily to validate the authority of those who brandish it.

We often see rhetorical shifts in such exchanges: instead of addressing the substance, the interlocutor redirects the discussion toward the person, their tone, or their attitude. This strategy avoids real argumentation and destabilizes the other. It is a classic defensive rhetoric: transforming a factual disagreement into a moral reproach. These shifts blur the discussion by moving the ground of analysis—from content to image—thus maintaining authority without rational justification.

The Manufactured Confusion: Posture versus Practice

It is not that the term itself has lost its meaning. Rather, it is its social uses that have emptied it of substance. Benevolence is confused with a sequence of prescribed behaviors, codified in training checklists or LinkedIn posts, without ever questioning their authenticity.

Research in social psychology shows this clearly: coherence between discourse and practice is central to how ethical behavior is perceived. The gaps, or “behavioral dissonances” (Festinger, 1957), are all the more visible when the vocabulary employed claims to be moral. In other words: the more benevolence is brandished as a banner, the more the gap with actual practices becomes evident.

An Ego Fed by KPIs

This distortion ultimately reveals a contradiction: the professional ego of those who self-designate as guardians of benevolence is nourished not by a fine knowledge of human beings and interactions, but by performance indicators (KPIs). In this framework, benevolence is not an ethic but a cosmetic tool, at the service of image and profitability.

Yet research in work psychology (Deci & Ryan, 2000; Van den Broeck et al., 2016) shows that the quality of authentic relationships is a key factor in self-determined motivation and well-being. What should be abandoned, therefore, is not the word itself but the practices that have distorted it.

References

• Boltanski, L., & Chiapello, E. (1999). Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme. Paris: Gallimard.

• Festinger, L. (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford University Press.

• Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78.

• Van den Broeck, A., Ferris, D. L., Chang, C. H., & Rosen, C. C. (2016). A review of self-determination theory’s basic psychological needs at work. Journal of Management, 42(5), 1195–1229.