Can condemning a common practice inadvertently normalise it?
“Too many employees are ignoring this rule”: the wording seems to justify a firm reminder. Yet the management question is specific: does highlighting how often a breach occurs help correct it, or inadvertently turn it into a reference point?
What the literature establishes
Robert B. Cialdini, Raymond R. Reno and Carl A. Kallgren (1990, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) distinguish descriptive norms, which indicate what others do, from injunctive norms, which indicate what is approved or disapproved of. Their experiments on littering show that the influence of these norms depends partly on which one the situation makes salient. A message can therefore disapprove of a behaviour while drawing attention to its prevalence.
Comparison can produce a boomerang effect
P. Wesley Schultz, Jessica M. Nolan, Robert B. Cialdini, Noah J. Goldstein and Vladas Griskevicius (2007, Psychological Science) studied feedback comparing households’ electricity consumption with that of their neighbours. This comparison reduced consumption among households initially above the average, but increased it among those initially below it. Adding a sign of approval for low-consuming households prevented this boomerang effect in their experiment.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that managers should always announce that the majority are behaving correctly. That conclusion goes beyond the findings and becomes misleading when no such majority has been established. The useful distinction is instead between the factual observation, the expected behaviour and approval of that behaviour, without turning a widespread breach into a behavioural benchmark. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot guarantee
These studies concern littering in public places and household electricity use, not reminders issued by workplace managers. They do not guarantee that rewording will suffice when behaviour depends on available equipment, workload or contradictory rules. Nor does an improvement following a message establish, on its own, that its normative framing caused the change.
A practical check in Sion
As part of SHR’s Communication programme, a team in Sion could test a reminder about sorting ordinary waste in a break area, whether it works in hydropower, healthcare, viticulture or Alpine tourism, excluding waste covered by specific procedures. Across two periods of equal length, compare an existing factual reminder emphasising mistakes with a message stating the expected action and the organisation’s approval of it, without inventing a majority. The measure would be the proportion of incorrectly sorted items among those inspected, using the same bins, technical signage and observation time slots. This local check provides a behavioural indicator rather than a judgement about the message’s tone, without constituting causal proof on its own. To go further: explore the Communication training in Sion in the canton of Valais, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Communication in Sion
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