Subordinates’ actions under instruction are not attributed to personality.

Evidence

An action will not be reckoned as attributable to personality if it is recognized as the result of a direct instruction from a superior (even if the instruction amounts to putting a signature to a proposal made by the subordinate). Therefore, subordinates who want to show themselves to be trustworthy must strive to exhibit the utmost industriousness, conscientiousness and readiness to carry out tasks loyally, well beyond what is customary practice. And, on the other hand, the same reason gives rise to the opposite strategy, namely, of rising to higher positions in order to reach a status in which, according to accepted opinion, one is regarded as personality-visible and can make free decisions (even if structure and circumstances virtually predetermine those decisions). — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 193

Categorization

• XREF: This is the precise structure of Stevens’s lifelong career strategy in The Remains of the Day — rising through loyal service to be ‘personality-visible’ — literally a Luhmannian subordinate. — connects to: The master relates to others as interchangeable class members, never as particular individuals — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 221; Workplace hierarchy requires personality traits, not cognitive skills, from workers — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 896
• ADDENDUM: Supports the thesis that deference to institutional roles produces total ethical abdication when the institution lacks moral grounding.