The Prevention Challenge: "That's Just Our Culture"

Real workplace situations. Difficult decisions. Evidence behind the choices.

In this challenge there is no single perpetrator to point to. The harm here is sustained by a whole team's shared way of explaining itself to itself. As you read, pay attention to how many different people, none of whom think of themselves as doing anything wrong, contribute a small piece of the justification that keeps the pattern going.

The Story

The Friday Firing Line had been a tradition on the account team for as long as anyone could remember. At the end of the week, the team gathered, in person or on the call, and went round the room reviewing the week's mistakes out loud. Marcus, who'd led the team for six years, had started it as a way of "keeping everyone sharp." Nobody was exempt. Senior people got roasted for missed deadlines just as much as anyone else, at least in theory.

Leah joined the team four months ago, straight out of a much smaller agency. Her first Friday Firing Line was about a typo in a client email. "Rookie error," someone said, laughing. Leah laughed too. It felt, that first week, like being let into something.

By her third month, the pattern had settled into something more specific. Leah made more mistakes than most, because she was still learning the systems everyone else had used for years, but her mistakes were the ones that got the most airtime. "Typo queen strikes again," Dev said one week, and it stuck. People used it fondly, they'd say, if you asked them. Leah started proofreading everything three times before sending it, and still dreaded Friday afternoons by Wednesday.

Dev had joined two years before Leah. In his first few months, he'd been on the receiving end of the same thing, he still remembered how it felt, he told a colleague once, half-joking, half not. Now he was usually the loudest voice in the room on a Friday. When a colleague asked him about it recently, he shrugged: "It's just how we do things here. I got put through it, everyone gets put through it. It made me better, honestly."

When Leah visibly struggled through one particularly rough Friday, quiet, clearly uncomfortable, barely speaking for the rest of the session, Rosa mentioned it to Dev afterwards.

"Do you think we went too far with the typo thing today?"

"She's fine," Dev said. "She laughs along. If she couldn't handle a bit of banter she wouldn't have lasted this long anyway."

Rosa wasn't sure that was true, but she also wasn't sure what she'd say if she raised it, that this was just the account team's culture, and everyone knew it, and it had never really been about any one person. She let it go.

Marcus, when a new starter once asked him directly whether Friday Firing Line was really necessary, said: "Look, I know it sounds harsh from the outside. But this industry is brutal. Clients don't go easy on us, if we can't take a joke internally, we won't survive out there. It's for their own good, in the end."

A New Manager

Farah took over the team eight months into Leah's time there, after a restructure moved her in from a different department. She hadn't grown up with Friday Firing Line and found herself, in her first few sessions, watching more than participating. She noticed that the same two or three names came up disproportionately. She noticed that "banter" from senior people toward junior people flowed in one direction far more than the other. She noticed Leah's nickname landing slightly differently than the others.

She also noticed that when she asked a mildly probing question about it in a one-to-one with Dev "how did you find Friday Firing Line when you were newer?" his answer was fluent and immediate, as though he'd explained it to himself many times before: it toughened you up, it wasn't personal, everyone went through it, it was nothing compared to how some other agencies treated juniors, and honestly, compared to that, this team was kind.

Leah eventually came to Farah directly, hesitant, apologetic almost, to say that she didn't think she could keep doing Fridays the way they currently ran. She was careful to say she didn't think anyone meant harm. She just wanted to know if there was another way.

Farah didn't have an immediate answer. She told Leah she needed to think about how to approach it not because she doubted Leah, but because she could already feel, even in herself, the pull of the explanations she'd have to push back against. It's just banter. It's tradition. Everyone's been through it. It's for their own good. She recognised, uncomfortably, that she'd already started rehearsing ways to raise it gently, so as not to seem like she was attacking the whole team's culture on her first few months in the job.

Pause and Reflect

First, name what actually happened

This case is unusual in that almost every line of dialogue is doing a specific piece of justificatory work, not just describing an event. It's worth naming these explicitly, because naming them is most of what makes this pattern visible at all:

• Marcus reframes public humiliation as "keeping everyone sharp" and later as being "for their own good" a euphemism and a moral justification, back to back.
• Dev invokes "it's just how we do things here" and "everyone gets put through it" spreading responsibility so thinly across the whole team that no individual, including himself, has to own any of it.
• Dev also reaches for "it's nothing compared to how other agencies treat juniors"  a comparison designed to make the current behaviour look mild by holding it against something worse, rather than against any actual standard.
• Dev's verdict on Leah  "she's fine, she laughs along"  minimises a visible sign of distress by treating a survival response (laughing along) as evidence that no harm occurred.
• The nickname "typo queen" reduces Leah to her mistakes rather than treating her as a colleague still learning a new system a mild but real version of stripping someone of their fuller identity.
• Even Farah, a manager who can see the pattern clearly from outside, notices herself already rehearsing softer ways to raise it which is worth sitting with, because if the pull toward minimising this is strong enough to affect someone actively trying to resist it, it says something about how powerful the shared explanation has become.

If you were Leah...

• What made your first Friday Firing Line feel like being "let in," and what changed?
• Notice that you were careful to tell Farah you didn't think anyone meant harm. Where do you think that instinct came from?
• What would it have taken for you to raise this sooner than month eight?

If you were Dev...

• You remember disliking this when you were new. What do you think happened between then and now that turned you into the person doing it to someone else?
• Is "it made me better" the same claim as "it didn't cost anything to make me better"? What would it take to hold both of those separately?
• When you told Rosa "she's fine, she laughs along," how much of that was actually about Leah, and how much was about not wanting the tradition to be the problem?

If you were Rosa...

• You had a moment of real doubt and voiced it to Dev. What made his answer enough to make you drop it, even though you weren't convinced?
• What would you have needed, from yourself, from someone else, from the situation, to take that doubt further?

If you were Farah...

• You could see the pattern clearly from outside, and you still caught yourself reaching for softer framing before you'd even acted. What does that tell you about how these explanations work, even on someone who isn't fully inside the culture yet?

Is there a difference between challenging a specific behaviour and being seen as "attacking the team's culture"? How would you keep those separate, in what you actually say?

Behind the Case

Why this situation is difficult

Most accounts of workplace aggression look for a moment you can point to and ask, "what should this person have done differently?" This case resists that question, because the harm isn't held by any single person's choices, it's held collectively, in a shared story the team tells itself about what Friday Firing Line is and why it's fine. Marcus built it, Dev perpetuates it, Rosa half-doubts it and stays quiet anyway, and even Farah, actively trying to see clearly, feels the explanations tugging at her own account of what she's looking at.

This is what makes group-level normalisation genuinely different from a bad manager or a difficult colleague: there's no one person whose removal would fix it. The explanations that sustain it: it's tradition, it's for their own good, everyone's been through it, it's nothing compared to elsewhere, exist independently of any single speaker, ready for whoever needs to reach for them next. Dev didn't invent any of these justifications. He inherited them, the same way he inherited the nickname he now uses on someone else.

What the Research Tells Us

Organisations, not just individuals, can develop a shared way of excusing harm and this can now be measured directly. Recent research by Fida and colleagues (2024) introduces the concept of organisational moral disengagement (OrgMD): a collective, shared perception among members of a team or organisation that misconduct within it is broadly excused or justified. Crucially, their research treats this as distinct from any one person's individual tendency to rationalise their own behaviour, it's a property of the group's shared understanding, which individuals then draw on, almost like a communal resource, whenever they need to explain away something uncomfortable. Dev didn't need to invent a justification for what happened to Leah. The team already had a full set ready for him to use.

The same eight mechanisms individuals use to excuse their own behaviour operate at group level too. Fida and colleagues build on Bandura's foundational model of moral disengagement, which identifies eight distinct ways people rationalise harmful actions: moral justification (Marcus's "it's for their own good"), euphemistic labelling (calling it "banter" or "keeping people sharp"), advantageous comparison (Dev's "nothing compared to other agencies"), displacement and diffusion of responsibility (Dev's "everyone gets put through it" spreading it so no one owns it), distorting or minimising consequences ("she's fine, she laughs along"), and a milder form of dehumanisation through reductive labelling (the "typo queen" nickname). What Fida and colleagues show is that when these mechanisms become shared and collective rather than individual, they don't just excuse behaviour after the fact, they actively license its continuation, because the next person facing the same discomfort has a ready-made, socially validated explanation waiting for them.

Shared moral disengagement predicts silence, not just misconduct. This is perhaps the most practically important finding for this case: Fida and colleagues found that organisational moral disengagement was associated not only with more unethical behaviour, but independently with employee silence about it. This gives a sharper explanation for Rosa's choice to say nothing than "she was scared" Rosa's silence reflects a broader, shared belief about what this team's culture is and how solid the case would need to be to challenge it, not (or not only) a personal calculation about her own risk in the moment Morrison and Milliken's organisational silence research described.

The pattern is transmitted, not static, which is exactly why Dev's transformation matters. Fida and colleagues describe organisational moral disengagement as a social learning process: members observe what the organisation appears to excuse, and over time internalise it as the standard for what counts as acceptable, sometimes going on to enact the same behaviour themselves. Dev disliking Friday Firing Line as a new starter and becoming its loudest voice two years later is not a contradiction. It's closer to the mechanism working exactly as this research would predict.

What Could Have Changed the Story?

If Marcus had asked what the tradition was actually for, rather than what it always had been: "Keeping everyone sharp" was never tested against whether it was actually achieving that, for whom, and at what cost. A founder of a tradition revisiting its original purpose periodically rather than assuming its long history is itself the justification is a meaningful check most long-running team rituals never get.

If Rosa's doubt had been treated as data, not noise: Rosa's private uncertainty was real information about the team's culture, and it evaporated the moment Dev supplied a fluent-sounding explanation. A team norm that treated a colleague's "did we go too far?" as worth a real pause, rather than something to be talked back down from, would have given that doubt somewhere to go.

If new starters' early discomfort was tracked, not just outgrown: Dev's own initial dislike of the ritual was real, once. If the team had any mechanism for checking in with people in their first months not about performance, but about how the team's specific rituals were landing that early, uncorrupted perspective might have been captured before it was replaced by the explanations that come with belonging.

If Farah named the specific mechanisms, rather than the culture as a whole: Attacking "the team's culture" invites defensiveness and closes down conversation. Naming a specific move "when we say someone 'laughs along,' are we checking that, or assuming it?" is much harder to dismiss as an outsider failing to understand how things work here, because it's a claim about evidence, not an attack on tradition.

If the organisation had a way to examine long-running rituals from outside the team that runs them: No one inside a culture is well positioned to evaluate it, because the same shared explanations that sustain the ritual will also explain away any concern raised about it. A periodic outside check even something as simple as an anonymous survey asking what newer starters actually experience, reviewed by someone outside the team could surface a pattern like this without relying on any one person inside it being brave enough to be first.

Prevention Challenge Table: Group Culture and Normalisation

Prevention Lens

This case illustrates that some of the most durable forms of workplace aggression aren't held by any one person's intent, but by a shared, self-sustaining set of explanations that a group offers itself and passes on to whoever joins next. Removing any single person from this story Marcus, Dev, even Rosa would not obviously fix it, because the justifications exist independently of who happens to be voicing them this week.

Key insight: When a whole team shares a belief that certain harmful behaviour is broadly excused  "that's just our culture," "everyone's been through it"  that shared belief doesn't only permit the behaviour to continue. Research suggests it also independently makes people less likely to say anything about it, which is exactly what allows the belief to keep being passed on unchallenged.

Questions for Your Own Practice

If you are a manager inheriting an established team...

• What long-running rituals or traditions exist on your team that predate you? When did anyone last ask what they're actually for?
• If you asked a team member "how did you find this when you were newer," how fluently would they be able to explain away any hesitation you heard in their own answer? What might that fluency itself be telling you?
• Can you name a specific mechanism (a euphemism, a comparison, an unchecked assumption) the next time something needs challenging, rather than the culture as a whole?

If you are a longer-standing member of a team...

• Is there a behaviour or tradition you once experienced as new and uncomfortable, and now perpetuate yourself? What changed between those two moments?
• If a colleague voices doubt about something the team does routinely, what's your instinct — to reassure them quickly, or to actually sit with the doubt alongside them?

If you are new to a team...

• Is there something about how your team operates that felt uncomfortable in your first weeks, which now feels normal? What would it look like to describe your very first impression of it, honestly, to someone?

If you are reflecting on your organisation...

• Does anyone outside a team ever get visibility into its specific rituals and traditions, or only into its output?
• If a whole team believed a certain kind of harmful behaviour was broadly excused here, how would your organisation ever find that out, given that the same belief would make the people affected less likely to say so?

Looking Back at the Story

• At what point do you think Leah's nickname stopped being harmless, if it ever was?
• Which character's justification do you think would be hardest to challenge directly, and why?
• Dev disliked this ritual once and now perpetuates it. Do you think this makes him more or less responsible than Marcus, who created it? Why?
• If you could change one moment in this story, which would it be?

If You Were Leah...

If you're experiencing something like this, one of the hardest parts can be that it's framed by others, and maybe by yourself as just how things are done, something everyone else seems to have gone through and accepted. That framing can make it very hard to know whether what you're feeling is a fair response to something real, or a sign you simply haven't adjusted yet.

Both of those things are worth taking seriously, and they aren't mutually exclusive. You can believe that no one intends harm and still find that something isn't working for you. That's a legitimate thing to raise, on its own terms, without needing to prove that the whole tradition is wrong for everyone.

Depending on your circumstances, this might include:

• a trusted colleague, ideally one who's also newer, who might be having a similar experience without either of you having said so yet
• your manager, even if, like Leah, you're not sure how to frame it as something bigger than "I'd prefer this a different way"
• Human Resources, particularly if a pattern seems to specifically and repeatedly affect newer or more junior team members
• an employee representative or trade union representative
• an Employee Assistance Programme (EAP), if available
• a trusted friend or family member

If you are in the UK, organisations such as Acas provide free and confidential advice on workplace issues, and if you are a union member, your trade union representative can help you understand your options.

You don't need to be the person who ends a long-running tradition single-handedly for your discomfort to matter. Sometimes the most useful first step is simply naming, out loud to one other person, what you actually noticed before you've decided what, if anything, you want to happen next.