When Colin Wightman was informed by the RCMP last June that he was the subject of a sexual assault investigation, he was forced to make two very uncomfortable phone calls.
Upon leaving the police station where he had described a “consensual one-time fantasy encounter” involving bondage and a woman he met on an Internet dating site, he called his wife and asked if he was allowed to come home.
The other phone call was to his employers at Acadia University in Wolfville, N.S., where he had worked for a year as a tenured professor and the director of the school of computer science.
“It was a very difficult phone call to make,” he said this week. “The only phone call that was more difficult was the one I made to my wife.”
More than a year after disclosing his affair to his family and employer, and almost 12 months after he was informed by the RCMP that they would not press charges, 48-year-old Dr. Wightman is still married, although the father of two is receiving counselling.
Things have not worked out so well with his job.
Last September, he was fired by Acadia in light of his “aberrant behaviour.”
A termination letter claimed he had used his work-issued laptop to engage in “highly inappropriate communications of a sexual nature,” and that “the conduct giving rise to [the police's] ongoing investigation is utterly incompatible with the purpose, principles and operating imperatives of Acadia University.”
Dr. Wightman is suing the university for wrongful dismissal, and he is just one of several individuals to recently find private aspects of their personal lives explode into highly damaging professional nightmares.
It is a strange new world for employers, who must be ready to protect their own image when embarrassing details of their employees' lives become known.
“We're living in a more media-crazy world, where what your employees do can potentially have very bad implications for you,” said Claus Rerup, an assistant professor of organizational behaviour at the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario. “But people have not put two and two together that this could happen.”
There also seems to be no overarching attitude about how to deal with these scandals, and whether personal revelations should be discussed in the HR office or the boardroom.
In Britain, Max Mosley, president of the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile, which oversees Formula One racing, has remained in his job despite a highly embarrassing lawsuit against a tabloid that published photographs of him engaging in sadomasochistic activities with several prostitutes, in what the paper dubbed a “Nazi sex romp.” (Mr. Mosley denies that the S & M session had a Nazi theme.)
In the United States, CBS war correspondent Lara Logan found herself at the centre of a tabloid sex scandal when it was reported that she is pregnant with the child of a married man she met while on assignment in Iraq. News of the affair eclipsed statements she made chastising the American media and general public for ignoring the ongoing war.
And U.S. senator Larry Craig has struggled to rebuild his reputation and retain his seat of power after being arrested for lewd conduct in an airport bathroom last June.
But Dr. Rerup believes it is companies who need to change their behaviour, not employees.
With people living more of their lives online, engaging in e-mail communication, chat rooms and social networking sites, it has become increasingly likely that companies will have to contend with the private behaviours of their employees becoming public, possibly to the detriment of the organization.
This new reality should be factored into human resources planning, he said, with policies developed for almost every potentially scandalous scenario.
“As a company, you have to decide on a process of how you'll deal with everything from drunk driving to rape, to cheating on your partner to taking to narcotics,” he said. “It's like having a faulty product – are you going to withdraw it from shelves or are you going to try and manage the media storm?”
