The Toxic Spiral of Blame
- awalker187
- Nov 25
- 6 min read
Years ago I had a manager who inadvertently created an incredibly toxic working environment.
They were a person who was driven by instinct.
When something goes wrong it’s instinctive to think “Who’s to blame?”
This was the manager’s immediate reaction every time.
It has the benefit of immediate closure.
The person at fault would be identified.
The puzzle was solved.
And the manager could be happy with their instincts being proved right again.
Only the world doesn’t operate like a murder mystery - things are usually much more complicated.
But because the blame was now set there was no need to search for any contributing problems.
So a lot of the time the real problem would persist and keep repeating.
But the manager didn’t see this pattern, they saw a different pattern - a pattern of poorly performing people.
For this manager everything was personal.
They believed everyone was either a saviour or a villain.
When a problem built up, a saviour was hired to fix it.
But then a set-back would happen and the former saviour would now be cast as a failure.
Over time everyone was tarnished by some perceived failure and the people now seen as villains were fired.
The one person the manager saw that didn't make mistakes was them.
When something went wrong it was somebody else’s fault.
Or if it was something only the manager was involved in, it was due to circumstances out of the manager’s control.
The solution for the manager was to take more and more responsibility on themselves.
So they spread themselves far too thin, becoming ineffective and even more destructive.
But they didn’t see that pattern either.
While this was all happening, team morale and effectiveness plummeted.
There were certain roles (the ones that the manager felt that they were a subject expert in) that the rest of the team learned to actively avoid.
Those specialties became the weakest part of the organisation and where the highest rate of employee churn was.
Some of the team also learned that the best way to avoid being the culprit was to pass the blame on to others.
The levels of trust between the rest of the team started to break down.
And without trust, the levels of learning and improvement in the team and product ground to a halt.
People learned to hide potential problems instead of highlighting them.
Instead of the team being able to address them, they remained out of sight until they exploded into even much more destructive issues.
And with bigger issues occurring with less warning, the manager became even more distrustful of the employees.
It became a circle of toxicity.
“A man can fail many times, but he isn't a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.” - John Burroughs
A bias for blame
Our instincts have flaws.
Wikipedia currently lists 175 separate cognitive biases that can and do mislead us.
We have these biases for evolutionary reasons.
They either help our brains to react faster or save energy, in our fight for survival.
But they can be very unhelpful to us in our less immediately threatening but more complicated world.
The result of some of these biases is that we are much quicker to identify flaws in others than we are at seeing faults in ourselves.
Bias blind spot - We recognise bias in others, but don’t see the bias in our own judgment.
Naïve cynicism - We assume others are more self-interested or biased than they actually are, and overlook the sincerity or complexity behind their actions.
Naïve realism - We believe that we see the world objectively, and those who disagree must be uninformed, irrational, or biased.
Actor–observer bias - We attribute our own actions to external circumstances while attributing others’ actions to their character.
Fundamental attribution error - We believe that what people do is a reflection of who they are and underestimate other factors which influence others’ behaviour.
Our natural bias for blame has always been there:
“It is easy to see the faults of others, but difficult to see one's own faults. A person broadcasts the fault; of others like winnowing chaff in the wind, but hides his own faults as a crafty bird-hunter conceals himself.” - Buddha (Dhammapada Verse 252)
“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?” - Jesus (Matthew 7:3)
Bad beats good
Then there’s a bias that affects the whole team - Negativity bias.
We pay much more attention to negative information than to positive.
A 2001 psychology study concluded that, “We have found bad to be stronger than good in a disappointingly relentless pattern.”
“The lack of exceptions suggests how basic and powerful is the greater power of bad,” and the only solution is that, “good can only match or overcome bad by strength of numbers.” [1]
In the 1970s the relationship psychologist John Gottman determined that a single negative experience is equal to five positive ones.
So if the balance of positive and negative experiences drops below that one-to-five ratio negativity starts to overwhelm.
The Blame Cycle
Reacting on instincts impacted by bias, creates a negative cycle.
An error or challenge creates a crisis that people have to fight to put out.
Once the fire is damped down, the recriminations are meted out.
Fear builds across the team who learn to cover up issues and withhold information.
Now everyone starts to see a rose tinted picture of the situation, while underneath more trouble brews.
Until once again something goes wrong and another crisis explodes.
But it’s not just a cycle.
The Toxic Spiral
In a blame culture the cycle keeps repeating, happening more often and resulting in more severe issues.
It turns into an increasingly rapid spiral of poor performance, toxic relationships, reduced well-being, and long-term failure in measurable ways:
Fear of blame discourages risk-taking, learning from mistakes, and highlighting problems. [2] [3]
A "head down, cover your ass" mentality leads to stagnation, complacency and lack of ownership or accountability. [4]
People are less willing to report errors or near misses, compromising opportunities for improvement. [5} [6]
Retaliation and infighting distract from strategic priorities and drain resources through interpersonal conflict. [7]
Trust between colleagues breaks down, limiting cooperation, knowledge sharing, and team effectiveness. [8] [9]
Employees experience higher stress, lower job satisfaction, and increased burnout. [10] [11]
Talented individuals will leave to find a safer work culture elsewhere. [3]
The Bounceback
Eventually the manager left.
We replaced blame culture with a culture of psychological safety to build back morale, trust and a supportive learning environment.
And we replaced a purely instinctive approach with systems thinking to address some of the underlying product and process issues.
Within a surprisingly short timeframe, largely the same team turned things around and started to experience growth and success again.
“Blaming an airplane crash on a sleepy pilot will not help to stop future crashes. To do that, we must ask: Why was he sleepy? How can we regulate against sleepy pilots in the future? If we stop thinking when we find the sleepy pilot, we make no progress. To understand most of the world’s significant problems we have to look beyond a guilty individual and to the system.” - Hans Rosling
I hope this was useful.
If it wasn’t, you know who to blame.
[1] Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Finkenauer, C., “Bad Is Stronger Than Good”, Review of General Psychology (2001)
Westover J. H., “The Rise and Toll of the Blame Culture”, Human Capital Leadership Review (2025)
[2] Argyris, C., “Single-loop and double-loop models in research on decision making”, Administrative Science Quarterly (1976)
[3] Cooper, D., “Towards a model of safety culture”, Safety Science (2000)
[4] Treviño, L. K., Weaver, G. R., Reynolds, S. J., “Behavioral ethics in organizations: A review”, Journal of Management (2003)
[5] Reason, J., “Human error: Models and management”, BMJ (2000)
[6] Weick, K. E., Sutcliffe, K. M., “Managing the unexpected: Resilient performance in an age of uncertainty” (2nd ed.) Jossey-Bass (2007)
[7] Treviño, L. K., Weaver, G. R., “Organizational justice and ethics program "follow-through": Influences on employees' harmful and helpful behavior”, Business Ethics Quarterly (2001)
[8] Edmondson, A., “Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams”, Administrative Science Quarterly (1999)
[9] Sitkin, S. B., See, K. E., Miller, C. C., Lawless, M. W., Carton, A. M., “The paradox of stretch goals: Organizations in pursuit of the seemingly impossible”, Academy of Management Review (2011)
[10] Dollard, M. F., Barlow, J. A., “Work stress, depression and work performance: Anxiety as a mediator”, Economic and Industrial Democracy (1990)
[11] Maslach, C., Leiter, M. P., “Early predictors of job burnout and engagement”, Journal of Applied Psychology (2008)
Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund “Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About The World - And Why Things Are Better Than You Think”, Sceptre (2018)
