'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.”
How individual performance metrics create blame culture
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 performance is judged on an individual basis, even when work is completed as a team.
Blame-shifting doesn’t just damage individual relationships, he says, it breaks down the unwritten agreements that govern workplace dynamics – particularly the psychological contract.
When employees feel their contributions are unfairly overlooked or that they are unjustly blamed for failures, their engagement and productivity suffer.
“If you violate this psychological contract, then people start being less productive,” says Reyt.
“They start adjusting their input, they start talking in your back, they start doing all sorts of counterproductive behaviors.”
Blame culture thrives in workplaces where individual performance is prioritized over teamwork, says Reyt.
"One of the main reasons this happens is when you have a very, very competitive environment where most of the rewards are individually based,” he says.
“If the rewards, if performance is calculated individually, but a lot of the work is team-based, you start to see that kind of stuff."
This misalignment between individual assessment and team-based work creates an incentive for employees to protect their personal standing, even if it means throwing teammates under the bus.
Rethinking performance evaluations to reduce blame shifting
If blame culture is deeply rooted in performance assessments, HR has a key role to play in reducing it, Reyt suggests. A shift in evaluation methods can help mitigate toxic behaviours, he says – starting with reducing individual accountability for overall team performance.
"You can talk about teamwork all you want – at some point, if people have to take the heat of individual metrics for teamwork, they'll blame other people,” he says.
“And it's not even a conscious decision. It's a bias… It takes a lot of maturity to fight that bias, and most people are incapable of fighting it.”
The solution? Incorporate team-based performance metrics into employee assessments, so workers can share accountability for whole team or project outcomes. By shifting the focus from individual blame to shared accountability, HR can promote collaboration and trust rather than competition and fear.
"Typically, what you want to do is have a big portion of the assessment that's team-based, so that you still have some individually based assessment. But most of it, especially if it's teamwork, should be team-based so that people motivate each other, so that people can be accountable as a team, and not just be accountable for their own behaviour,” Reyt says.
Creating concrete assessment methods to prevent blame games
One of the biggest challenges HR faces in blame culture prevention is identifying blame-shifting behaviours early, before they cause serious issues. Many forms of blame-shifting, such as withholding information, spreading negative gossip, or subtly attributing failures to others, are difficult to quantify.
To tackle this, Reyt recommends “as concrete an assessment protocol as possible, because what I see here is a lot of interpretation of behaviour.”
“What you want to measure is an actual practical behaviour without interpretation.”
For HR professionals, this means implementing clear and measurable performance metrics that reduce the opportunity for subjective blame. For example, structured rubrics can make evaluations less reliant on personal perceptions and more rooted in objective assessments of work completed.
Countering blame culture in the workplace with accountability
The top reason for toxic behaviour among colleagues, according to the survey, is:
- protecting one’s reputation (47%)
- avoiding personal consequences (45%)
- career advancement (40%).
Beyond changing evaluation structures, HR should also take an active role in teaching employees how to take responsibility for their actions, with stricter no-tolerance approaches to toxic behaviour among co-workers.
If blame-shifting is left unchecked, Reyt points out, it can quickly become embedded in workplace culture.
"The advice I have for managers is, you need to teach people how to take ownership for their actions,” he says.
“If your assessment method is too individualistic and not collectivistic enough, if it's too focused on the individual, then you need to change it. And also, you can't let it happen. If people are starting to tell you that it's other people's fault, you need to put an end to it.”
