When a Behavior Problem Isn't Just a People Problem

Why identifying who did something is not the same as understanding why it happened.

An employee repeatedly works around a required process. A manager fails to make decisions at the level expected of them. Two departments continually struggle to coordinate. Employees resist a new way of working. A team repeatedly misses the same handoff.

When these problems appear, organizations naturally look toward the people involved. Who didn't follow the process? Who failed to communicate? Who wasn't holding people accountable? Who needs more training?

Those are legitimate questions. People make decisions, possess different capabilities and remain responsible for their actions. But identifying who performed a behavior does not necessarily tell us why that behavior occurred. Those are two different questions. And confusing them can lead organizations to solve the wrong problem.

Behavior does not occur in isolation

Organizational Behaviour has long studied the relationship between people and the environments in which they work. Research across areas such as motivation, job design, organizational climate, leadership, social norms and organizational constraints demonstrates that workplace behavior can be related to both individual characteristics and the conditions surrounding the work.

Employees operate within structures, processes and technologies. They encounter workloads and competing demands. They depend on information, resources, authority and other people to complete their work. Those conditions matter. But they do not determine everyone's behavior in exactly the same way.

Different people can respond differently to similar organizational conditions.

That distinction is important. One employee encountering an ineffective process might create a workaround. Another might follow the process despite the frustration. Another might escalate the problem. Another might make mistakes. Another might eventually disengage.

Research into organizational constraints reflects some of this complexity. Workplace constraints can affect workload and motivation through different pathways, and the relationship between organizational conditions and performance is not necessarily simple or uniform.

So observing a difficult organizational condition does not prove that the condition caused a particular behavior. But observing the behavior does not prove that the explanation lies entirely with the person either. Both require investigation.

Consider the employee who keeps bypassing the process

Imagine an organization has a formal approval process. An employee repeatedly bypasses one step and contacts the final approver directly.

The behavior is observable: The employee is not following the process. That may be completely accurate. But watch what can happen next.

The observation becomes: They don't follow procedures.

Something has changed. We have moved from describing what happened to explaining why it happened.

Perhaps that explanation is correct. The employee may understand the process, have everything required to follow it and simply choose not to. That is one possibility. But there are others.

Perhaps the required approval regularly takes longer than the work allows. Perhaps necessary information is lost at one of the handoffs. Perhaps authority is unclear. Perhaps the employee is accountable for an outcome but does not control a decision necessary to achieve it. Perhaps two organizational priorities conflict. Or perhaps the explanation lies somewhere between the person and the organizational conditions surrounding them.

That third possibility matters.

The same conditions do not create the same response

Suppose four employees encounter the same difficult approval process. One follows it exactly. One continually escalates delays. One creates a workaround. One uses personal relationships to get the approval completed.

Same process. Different behaviors.

It would be difficult to argue that the process alone explains the variation. But that does not make the process irrelevant.

Individual knowledge, experience, judgment, motivation, relationships and decision-making capability may influence how each person responds to the same condition. At the same time, the organizational environment may make certain responses more useful, costly, difficult or likely.

This is why simple explanations can be misleading. “It's a people problem” may ignore important organizational conditions. “It's a system problem” may ignore meaningful differences between individuals.

The more useful question is: What combination of individual capability, organizational conditions and interaction between the two best explains what we are observing?

That question changes the investigation.

Look for patterns, not just incidents

Imagine now that the original employee leaves. A new employee takes the role. Several months later, the new employee independently develops essentially the same workaround.

That does not prove the organization caused the behavior. But it changes the evidence.

Now suppose employees in three different locations using the same process have developed similar workarounds. Again, not proof. But the explanation that this is simply one difficult employee becomes less convincing.

Now imagine the organization changes the approval process. Necessary information becomes available earlier, authority is clarified and an unnecessary handoff is removed. The workaround largely disappears.

Once again, this does not automatically establish a causal explanation. But taken together, these observations provide much better evidence than the original statement: “That employee doesn't follow procedures.”

The organization has begun to discriminate between competing explanations.

Leaders can look for variation. Does the behavior occur across different people? Does the same person behave differently under different conditions? Does the pattern appear only when workload increases? Does it persist when personnel change? Does it recur across teams or locations? Does it disappear or change when a relevant organizational condition changes?

Each piece of evidence can strengthen one explanation, weaken another or reveal that the answer is more complicated than either.

Behavior can be evidence without becoming an excuse

There is an important boundary here. Investigating organizational conditions does not eliminate individual accountability.

An employee can make a poor decision in a difficult system. A manager can fail to perform despite having the capability, authority, information and resources required. Someone can knowingly disregard a reasonable process.

At the same time, holding someone accountable does not eliminate the need to investigate the conditions surrounding what happened. Both can be true.

An organization might appropriately address an individual's behavior while also discovering that its processes, priorities or decision rights made the same problem more likely to occur again.

The objective is not to find somewhere else to place blame. It is to understand the problem well enough to know what actually needs to change.

Sometimes behavior changes the organization too

There is another complication. The relationship between organizational conditions and behavior does not necessarily move in only one direction.

Consider the workaround again. Perhaps one employee originally develops it because the formal process is ineffective. The workaround succeeds. Other employees begin using it. Managers become accustomed to it. New employees learn it from experienced colleagues. Eventually, the informal workaround becomes how the work actually gets done.

Now the behavior is doing more than responding to an organizational condition. It is helping reinforce the way the organization operates.

The process influences behavior. Repeated behavior, in turn, influences the practiced process.

This is one reason organizational problems can be difficult to understand from a single incident or metric. Organizations are dynamic systems of people, capabilities, processes, technologies, authority, information and relationships. What happens in one part can change the conditions encountered elsewhere.

The WholeFrame perspective

WholeFrame examines organizations as systems of coordinated capabilities and interdependencies.

Our public explanatory model is:

Need → Purpose → Organization → Interdependencies → Behavior → Performance

This model is a practical translation of the questions WholeFrame is developing and investigating. It should not be interpreted as a proven linear causal law.

People bring knowledge, experience, judgment, values, relationships, creativity, motivation and decision-making capability into organizations. They also operate within organizational conditions. They depend on processes, information, technology, authority, resources and other capabilities to perform their work. Those elements interact.

For WholeFrame, this means an observed behavior should not automatically begin with either of two conclusions: The person is the problem. or The system caused it.

Instead, the behavior becomes evidence to investigate.

What does the individual bring to the situation? What conditions surround the work? What capabilities are required? Where are the important dependencies? What information and authority are available? What competing demands exist? What consequences reinforce or discourage particular responses? How do different people behave under similar conditions? How does the same person behave when those conditions change? And what happens elsewhere in the organization as those behaviors repeat?

The objective is to keep plausible explanations open long enough to distinguish among them.

A better question for leaders

The next time a recurring behavior problem appears, start by separating two questions: Who performed the behavior? and Why did the behavior occur?

The first may be easy to answer. The second usually requires more work.

Look at the person. But also look at the process. Look at the available capability. Look at information. Look at workload and competing demands. Look at authority and decision rights. Look at resources. Look at relationships and dependencies.

Then look at variation.

What do different people do when they encounter similar conditions?

That question is particularly powerful because variation contains information. If people respond similarly, ask what conditions they share. If people respond differently, ask what differs. If behavior changes when conditions change, investigate that relationship. If the same pattern survives different people, investigate what remains constant.

None of these observations should become an automatic causal conclusion. They are ways of getting closer to one.

Understand before you intervene

Organizations cannot avoid making judgments about behavior. Nor should they. Leaders need to establish expectations, make decisions and hold people accountable.

But good leadership also requires distinguishing an observation from an explanation.

A person performed the behavior. That is evidence about who acted. It is not yet a complete explanation of why it happened.

The WholeFrame Organizational Diagnostic is designed to investigate how work actually gets done across an organization and identify significant organizational connections, conditions, interdependencies, assets and performance constraints.

It does not need to begin with the assumption that the problem is the person. It also does not need to begin with the assumption that the organization caused it. It begins with investigation.

Because the purpose of understanding organizational behavior is not to remove accountability from people or transfer blame to a system. It is to understand what is happening well enough to make a better decision about what deserves attention.

Who did it? and Why did it happen? are different questions.

Strong organizational diagnosis requires both.

Understand why. See how it connects. Improve what matters.

Sources & Further Reading

Tett, R. P., & Burnett, D. D. (2003). A Personality Trait-Based Interactionist Model of Job Performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 88(3), 500–517. Foundational work examining how individual characteristics and features of work situations can interact in relation to workplace behavior and performance.

Meyer, R. D., Dalal, R. S., & Hermida, R. (2010). A Review and Synthesis of Situational Strength in the Organizational Sciences. Journal of Management, 36(1), 121–140. A review examining how characteristics of situations—including constraints, consequences, clarity and consistency—can affect the expression of individual differences.

Pindek, S., Howard, D. J., Krajcevska, A., & Spector, P. E. (2019). Organizational Constraints and Performance: An Indirect Effects Model. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 34(2), 79–95. Research examining relationships among organizational constraints, workload, motivation and performance.

Tett, R. P., Ragsdale, J., Mol, S. L., & Hundley, N. (2017). Situations at Work: A Review of Situational Factors in Understanding Work Behavior. In The Oxford Handbook of Psychological Situations, 466–489. A broader review of situational factors relevant to workplace behavior across task, group and organizational levels.

WholeFrame did not conduct the external research referenced above. These sources provide part of the established scientific foundation informing this article. The WholeFrame interpretations, diagnostic questions and developing organizational-science propositions presented here are WholeFrame's own synthesis.