Recently I have had several intense, heartfelt conversations about the NCAA sanctions, specifically whether it is appropriate to punish an institution as a whole for actions of individuals within, when it is possible to punish the individuals directly. This discussion raises an issue of institutional coherence, i.e. the treatment of a whole institution as a single coherent entity, with rights and responsibilities similar to those of a person.

Human beings are wired to recognize and organize our worlds in terms of interactions between people: these are the skills favored by our development as social creatures. We are then naturally equipped to interact with outside organizations – tribes, firms, institutions – as if they are people also: we have a relationship to each one. The word “corporation” derives from the Latin “corporare,” meaning to combine in one body. This tendency to process relationships to and between organizations as similar to relationships between people is a useful societal organizing principle, since it enables a shared understanding of collective acts. But one must keep in mind the limits of this tendency: organizations are not really people.

“Not on my watch”

A good and proper leader will resign if their organization fails in a major way, even if they were not themselves aware of the incipient failure. Why? To reinforce the obligation that leaders have to support and reinforce the institutional practices and culture that minimize the chances of failure. This obligation to resign is arguably not fair to the individual, but y’know, leadership itself is not fair: why should one person have power over another? With that unfair power comes unfair obligations. Both are necessary for a society as a whole to function well.

This much – the responsibilities of good leaders towards their organizations – is I hope largely uncontroversial. Now what of the responsibilities of the non-leaders within an organization?

An individual at Penn State gains if a different member of Penn State wins a Nobel Prize or a national championship, or achieves some other goal that elevates the university’s reputation. To what extent is this reward justified? I see two ways. First, an achievement by one member of an institution provides new information to society as a whole about the quality of that institution, and this information may legitimately reflect upon the quality of other individuals who that institution has seen fit to accept as members. But the sense of reward that other members feel at the achievement of a colleague seems to exceed what is justified by this diffuse and indirect reflection. A second mechanism has come into play: the human tendency to identify in groups, and to think of a group as a collective person, corporare. We accept the reward because we are part of the group. We did well. Do we accept the failures to the same, more, or lesser extent?

Summing up

An organization often engages in relationships with other entities as if it was a really big person. This identification is obviously objectively wrong – institutions are not people – but nevertheless the anthropomorphism has value: It provides a shared, automatic, unconscious understanding of how to organize society, and it creates obligations amongst all members of an organization towards reinforcing practices and culture that contribute to success and minimize the chance of failure. A good and proper leader has such obligations even beyond their immediate sphere of knowledge and awareness. They accept both the rewards and the punishments that flow from this understanding. Should the non-leaders within an organization share these rewards and punishments, or does that spread the responsibility too far?