Loyalty seems like a quality that is becoming increasingly difficult to find. People today feel less and less obligated towards their employer. Years ago, employees believed that once hired they would stay with the same company until retirement. This is no longer the case. People today change jobs and even careers at least once in their lives. People's sense of obligation and loyalty has changed. How loyal should employees be to their employer? Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay In the article Four Concepts of Loyalty, David Soles discusses different views on loyalty and how they relate to employee loyalty. The first point of view is that of Josiah Royce, an American idealist. According to Royce, loyalty requires total and thorough dedication to a cause. Royce's definition of loyalty would lead people to believe that a truly loyal employee “would always be willing to put the interests of the employer before purely private interests, even in matters unrelated to work; a loyal employee would never support or vote for social policies or legislation that could harm the employer's interests; a loyal employee would never criticize or oppose the actions of the employer" and so on. These are not realistic expectations and most people would agree that the average employee would not behave in this way. The idealist concept of loyalty implies that a company is very unlikely to qualify as an object to which people can be loyal. It requires people to contribute more than most people would conceive of contributing to their employer their job or even their career cannot be compared to that of a family or a close friend. The common sense view of loyalty is one that most of us are familiar with of people see no problem with being a loyal fan of a baseball team or with someone being loyal to their alma mater. There are three basic characteristics of loyalty that relate directly to the commonsense view. First, loyalty involves having a positive attitude toward the object of one's loyalty. Second, loyalty involves serving the interests of the object to which one is loyal. And finally, both the concern and obligation that a person believes he or she has toward the object connects that person to that object. The common sense view goes on to discuss employees' loyalty to their employer. According to this conception, no one has an obligation to be faithful to anything. For a person to be faithful to something, one must care about it. Furthermore, people may have moral obligations to perform certain actions but we do not have moral obligations to have certain attitudes and beliefs. The common sense view also states that one should bestow one's loyalty only on those objects that are worthy of it. Furthermore, if a person feels obligated towards his or her employer, loyalty is said to exist. However, if the feeling of obligation did not exist, would the employee owe anything to his employer? The concept of employee loyalty has many meanings. Depending on how you define loyalty and how it is applied, it can be very different. As if this concept wasn't complicated enough, what happens when employees are retrenched or drug tested in.