Collective responsibility

[citation needed] Collective responsibility is widely applied in corporations, where the entire workforce is held responsible for failure to achieve corporate targets (for example, profit targets), irrespective of the performance of individuals or teams which may have achieved or overachieved within their area.

The concept of collective responsibility is present in literature, most notably in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", a poem telling the tale of a ship's crew who died of thirst after they approved of one crew member's killing of an albatross.

1959's Ben-Hur and 1983's prison crime drama Bad Boys depict collective responsibility and punishment.

[10] In some countries with parliamentary systems, there is a convention that all members of a cabinet must publicly support all government decisions, even if they do not agree with them.

[11] As a result of collective responsibility, the entire government cabinet must resign if a vote of no confidence is passed in parliament.

Some examples of it are the account of the Flood, the Tower of Babel, Sodom and Gomorrah and in some interpretations, the Book of Joshua's Achan.

These sequences of events are reconciled for the former example afterwards as the etiological basis for the reader's presumed good fortunes in the Noahic covenant[14] with all living creatures, in which God promises never again to destroy all life on Earth (a category implicitly broader than the unrighteous) by flood[15] and creates the rainbow as the sign of this "everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth",[16] and for the latter example pre-empted with an explicitly stated numerical target of 9 other community members' lives to be put in peril (and to have an ostensibly lower number of homes destroyed, being located in Sodom) due to a hypothetical 10th's evaluation as unrighteous.

This practice is documented in Matthew 27:25-66 New International Version (NIV) 25: "All the people answered, 'His blood is on us and on our children!'"

Historically, collective punishment is a sign of authoritarian and/or totalitarian tendencies in the institution and/or its home society.

[7] During the occupation of Poland by Nazi Germany, the Germans applied collective responsibility: any kind of help which was given to a person of Jewish faith or origin was punished with death, and not only the rescuer, but his/her family was also executed.

[25] Communities were held collectively responsible for the purported Polish counter-attacks against the invading German troops.

Mass executions of łapanka hostages were conducted every day during the Wehrmacht advance across Poland in September 1939 and thereafter.