If you took any high school or college psychology classes, you may be familiar with these types of words/ideas:
- Bystander effect
- Diffusion of responsibility
- Kitty Genovese
You can read about all this stuff here, but basically this is what happened: a woman was getting stabbed in NYC. Dozens of neighbors heard it and/or saw some commotion, and no one did anything. It’s a psychological principle, then, that basically says “I see this stuff happening, but I assume someone else is on it!” (It should be noted that some of the reporting on the Genovese case was flawed, but the psychological ideas behind it still have value.)
You see diffusion of responsibility play out in literally dozens upon dozens of contexts. Work is not an exception here.
Indeed, here’s an article called “Why Open Secrets Exist In Organizations.” If you’ve ever worked in an organization for even 11 seconds, you know that this headline is true. But why?
Well, the people that wrote it came to the central conclusion that “as issues become more common among front-line employees, the idea that anyone will present those issues to management decrease,” noting:
Indeed, our research shows that when multiple individuals know about an issue, each of them…
