Loyalty? Why would anyone have loyalty to a company unless the company has shown significant loyalty to them first? And how would a company show loyalty? I don't mean your team or manager covering for you when something comes up or things like that. That should engender loyalty to those people. That is different from loyalty to the company. I might go further and say that loyalty to a company is wrongheaded. Loyalty to mission or ideal, sure. Loyalty to people. Loyalty to the function in society that needs to be fulfilled in order for society to work (garbage has to be picked up, sewers have to function).

But a company? It's an exchange of my time acting in their interests for their money. A legal abstraction and corresponding rituals that we use in our society as a unit of organization. It's like being loyal to your filing system.

And after the nonsense Francis dealt with, it's hard to imagine why he would feel loyalty to anyone involved in the direction and management of the company. He probably should have chosen his coworkers that he used for references more carefully, too.

Loyalty to a company goes hand in glove with equity participation.

Francis has already invested ~years of time in this company and they've allowed other toxic people to poopoo his career. Sure they've fired Lee (who clearly needs to go) but Ling has yet to see any consequence, and they've stalled on reevaluating Ling's veto.

In the meantime Francis apparently has to stomach this news and wait til the next promotion cycle in six months, one year? This is Francis' life - why should he waste that opportunity cost when he could be {saving for a house|supporting a family} (or some other life commitment).

This is what you get when everything in your business is a process and dehumanized: to the stakeholders other than Francis, this is a headache - a fire to fight in your business as usual.

To Francis this is trajectory altering, of course he has a right to be furious.

Keep in mind that Francis got promotion vetoed against meritorious reason out of spite thanks to collusion of an inept engineer. What loyalty companu showed? Still considering promotion he would have gotten? That is not even amending damage done by politics.

Of course you'll get loyalty from inept people, they don't have much else to offer. I am not sure if that's a value you're looking for. You wanna have politicians, you promote loyalty, you wanna have engineers you promote merit and skills.

Employee loyalty is important to some degree. But knowing when your loyalty is being taken advantage of is also important.

Lee instead of accepting and fixing mistake, attempted to get Francis fired over it.

Failing at that he managed to get one of his friend to deny Francis' deserved promotion. Then gloated about it so Francis found out.

I don't see a single reason for loyalty to a company, especially this one.

The manager should be fired. Regardless of whether the veto was correct or not, it was very unprofessional to leak the reason that the promotion was denied to other co-workers. That unprofessionalism put the company in a very bad position.