Extramarital affairs at the office leave employees fending for themselves

By SUE SHELLENBARGER, The Wall Street Journal

For Dick Kline, office romance in the news this week hit a sore spot.
When a creative director he worked with on a previous job years ago had an extramarital affair with a co-worker, Mr. Kline, an art director, and other employees of the big ad agency were aware of it. The illicit relationship was not only a distraction in the office but offended some co-workers, causing them to lose respect for the creative director.
The experience left Mr. Kline, of Yonkers, N.Y., with some clear-cut views on morality at the office: “The rules of the game should be, ‘No hanky-panky during working hours. No exceptions.”‘

His experience lends insight into why some office romances erupt into scandal. Most employers look the other way when issues of morality arise around extramarital affairs; Boeing’s firing this week of CEO Harry Stonecipher, whose dalliance risked embarrassing the company, was an exception. But co-workers don’t look the other way. Colleagues rush in where corporate leaders fear to tread, fixing on their co-workers’ romantic wrongs, making judgments and often lashing out in damaging ways.
The events leading to Mr. Stonecipher’s departure were triggered when directors were tipped off to the relationship after receiving a copy of explicit e-mail he had written. It isn’t yet known who alerted the directors.

Co-workers are often affected by extramarital flings at the office. They may feel morally compromised if a colleague expects them to be complicit in hiding an extramarital affair from a spouse. They may lose out on promotions or projects if the boss favors a lover over them.

Although polls show a large majority of Americans believe extramarital affairs are wrong, employers typically resist making such judgments. Just 12 percent of 391 companies surveyed by the American Management Association have written guidelines on office dating.

One reason is that about 20 states and many cities ban employment discrimination on the basis of marital status. If a married employee who has an affair is fired and an unmarried employee who has an affair is not, the fired employee in those states conceivably could claim illegal discrimination, attorneys say. Thus, many employers turn a blind eye to marital cheating.

That creates an environment where employees are often on their own in deciding what to do about it. Some workers in the 1990s tried to advance so-called third-party sexual harassment lawsuits, claiming they had missed out on promotions or raises because a superior favored an office lover. But the courts have backed away; generally, judges have ruled co-workers’ injuries aren’t severe or pervasive enough to warrant damages, says Gregory M. Davis, an employment attorney in Chicago with Seyfarth Shaw.

Nevertheless, some outraged co-workers feel compelled to act, dropping the political equivalent of an A-bomb and potentially sending their own careers into a Linda Tripp-like swoon. Before taking that path, ask yourself first whether you’re experiencing measurable on-the-job damage, or just moral outrage. Try “straightening out your feelings with your own minister or therapist” rather than attacking the co-worker, advises Ann Pardo, director of behavioral health at Canyon Ranch Health Resort, Tucson, Ariz.
Janet Lever, a sociologist at California State University who has studied the matter, says people have a legitimate beef if a co-worker, in effect, expects them to lie on their behalf. In such cases, co-workers have a right to say, “Don’t make me do your dirty work,” she says.

If an affair disrupts your work or harms teamwork or morale, “the first step is to go to that offending person face-to-face, privately,” Dr. Pardo says. If that fails or isn’t feasible, consider talking to a human-resources manager. At that point, however, you lose control: Depending upon the rules or customs at your office, a human-resource manager might ignore you; counsel the offender(s); report the affair to a supervisor; or arrange for one or both of the offending lovers to be transferred or fired.

More employees will likely face these issues in the future. While the proportion of men admitting to ever having had an extramarital affair is about flat at 22 percent, the same as a decade ago, evidence suggests that the number of women who have cheated is rising. The National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago says 15 percent of the women in a 3,000 person survey said “yes” when asked if they had ever engaged in an extramarital affair, up from 10 percent previously, based on a 2002 survey. More of these affairs are taking place in the workplace.

A few employers have taken steps toward a solution. Southwest Airlines, which employs more than 1,000 married couples, explicitly allows consensual office relationships. But it also has set a process for employees who object to a particular office romance to complain to the employee-relations department or to a manager, who in turn is charged with finding a remedy if the affair “negatively impacts our culture,” the company says.
More employers should probably do the same.