The blame for what an employee did wrong doesn't always stay with the employee. Under the wrong conditions, it migrates straight to you.

An employee comes to you because a coworker cut them out of a decision, took credit for their work, or froze them out of a project. Your instinct is to treat it as a problem between the two of them — you'll mediate, maybe have a word with the coworker, and move on. A study published this month says that instinct can be wrong in a specific, predictable way: the resentment doesn't always stay with the coworker who caused it. Sometimes it travels straight up to you.

The paper, "Who Is to Blame? A Network Perspective on Workplace Injustice," appears in the Journal of Organizational Behavior from Jeffrey J. Haynie, Bryan Fuller, Christopher L. Martin, and Pierre Andrieux at Louisiana Tech University's College of Business Administration, and Hettie A. Richardson at Texas Christian University's Neeley School of Business. It is two studies. Study 1 uses what the authors call event-based data — responses tied to specific incidents of coworker mistreatment — to test whether blame for a coworker's offense migrates to the supervisor. Study 2 constructively replicates that finding and adds boundary conditions: does the migration depend on formal, delegation-based power, or on informal, status-based power, or both. I'll say plainly how far I got: the full paper is behind a Wiley paywall, so what follows is drawn from the published abstract, not the complete method and results.

Study 1 found that being wronged by a coworker predicted seeing the supervisor as unjust too, and that this ran through a specific sequence: victim blames the coworker, then blames the supervisor, and that supervisor-blame is what produces the perception of supervisor injustice. Study 2 named the condition under which this migration gets stronger: what the authors call perceived intermediary delegation, meaning the victim sees the coworker as having acted as the supervisor's agent. That effect strengthens specifically when the victim also holds lower relative status with the supervisor than with the offending coworker — the two conditions work together, not separately, in what the abstract reports.

Here is the sentence that stood out to me:

Together, these findings suggest that accountability judgments arise within power-laden networks rather than in isolated dyads. From the published abstract, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Sept. 2, 2026

In plainer terms: when someone decides who's at fault, they aren't just looking at who did the thing. They're reading the whole map of who reports to whom, who seems to be acting on whose behalf, and where they themselves sit in that map relative to everyone involved.

This matters more for you than for a supervisor three layers down in a large company. In a company like yours, delegation is often informal and constant — "ask Dana, she handles scheduling," "check with Marcus, he's got authority on that account." Every time you hand off a task that way, you may be creating exactly the condition this research describes: an employee who now reads Dana's or Marcus's decision as something done under your authority. If that employee already feels lower in standing relative to you than relative to Dana or Marcus, the paper's model says the resentment is more likely to land on you specifically, whether or not you had anything to do with the incident.

The part the research doesn't say, but that I'll say plainly: I don't know how often the kind of casual, verbal delegation common in a company like yours counts as "perceived intermediary delegation" the way the authors measured it — the abstract doesn't describe the industries or job types in either sample. What the study does establish is the mechanism itself: blame is not fixed to the person who acted. It moves through the network of who's seen as answering to whom, and it moves further when the person doing the blaming already sees themselves as beneath you.

One thing to do this week: the next time an employee reports unfair treatment by a coworker, ask two questions before you decide this is between the two of them. Did the coworker's action look, from the employee's seat, like something done under your authority or on your instruction? And does this employee already see more distance between themselves and you than between themselves and the coworker? If both answers point the same way, expect the account to eventually settle on your desk, and address it as your issue rather than theirs.

That's a question about how you hand work off, which is what the Leadership Profile at /wiring-map maps.