'You can talk about teamwork all you want – if people have to take the heat of individual metrics for teamwork, they'll blame other people': academic blames performance assessments for toxic workplaces
Many employees are experiencing blame-shifting and other toxic behaviours at work. However, many more claim they have never engaged in such behaviours.
Almost two-thirds (61%) of employees have been “thrown under the bus” by colleagues, yet 73% claim they have never engaged in this behaviour themselves, according to a survey by Resume Now, which provides insights for HR.
Key factors contributing to blame culture at work are competition and self-serving bias, according to Jean-Nicolas Reyt, associate professor of organizational behaviour at McGill University,
"The axe forgets, but the tree remembers, and that's really true,” he says.
“When we hurt somebody, we're quick to forget about it, but when people hurt us, we remember it forever.”
The survey identified blame shifting as the most common form of workplace sabotage with 26 per cent of respondents fessing up to blaming others for their mistakes. Also common is “sharing negative information about a coworker to leadership” (21%).
Employees tend to take personal credit for successes while attributing failures to external factors – including their colleagues, says Reyt, stressing that this natural human tendency can be especially problematic in workplaces where...
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