Nobody’s Watching: Why Good People Break the Rules at Work

Why do people follow rules—and why do perfectly decent people sometimes break them? New research involving more than 14,000 people found something surprisingly wholesome: even when nobody is watching, breaking the rule would make us money, and no one would be harmed, 55–70% of us still follow the rule. Researchers call this “unconditional rule-following.” Translation: a lot of people behave because they genuinely believe they should, not merely because HR, God, or a traffic camera might be watching. And then there are the rest of us. When we break rules, we’re remarkably talented at maintaining our self-image as good people. Psychologists call it moral disengagement; we call it having an excellent explanation. The rule was unfair. We were helping someone. Everyone else was doing it. Nobody got hurt. Or the perennial classic: At least I didn’t do what THEY did. At work, rule-breaking gets even more complicated. Professor Martin Gill’s research suggests employees violate rules for very different reasons: self-interest, helping someone else, pressure from coworkers, or serving what they see as a higher purpose. The employee who pads an expense report and the employee who bends a policy to save a furious customer may both have broken a rule—but they are not engaging in the same behavior. And Kirsten wants to add another category to Professor Gill’s list : disengagement. Sometimes people aren’t nobly rebelling, cleverly rationalizing, or pursuing personal gain. Sometimes they simply stop paying attention. They cease noticing the expectations that allow a workplace—or any community—to function.  In other words, the employee who is so disengage they don’t even realize they’re breaking your rule. Which brings us to the social contract: the mostly unwritten agreement that we will each do our part, follow enough of the rules, and avoid making everyone else clean up after us.  This is all to say, breaking rules in the workplace can be informative of broken systems, problems, inefficiencies, disengaged workers or maybe even plain misconduct.