Fear of retaliation drives collective blindness to workplace wrongdoing

Evidence

The preceding analyses have largely focused on the lengths to which perpetrators go to avoid seeing the harm they cause. The world of work presents another type of moral predicament in which associates and supervisors are witness to institutional wrongdoings. Out of fear of retaliation and being ostracized as informers or troublemakers, they collectively turn a blind eye to what is going on (Heffernan, 2011). Compliant accommodation to institutional wrongdoing is self-devaluing unless morally justified. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 483

Categorization

• XREF: The compliance-under-threat mechanism parallels Milgrom’s point that institutions must solve a punishment-motivation problem; also echoes how ordinary people, not zealots, sustain harmful policy by conforming.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 483