"To hold a group or individual accountable for activities of any kind without assigning to him or them the necessary authority to discharge that responsibility is manifestly both unsatisfactory and inequitable. It is of great Importance to smooth working that at all levels authority and responsibility should be coterminous and coequal." (Lyndall Urwick, "Dynamic Administration", 1942)
"Complete accountability is established and enforced throughout; and if there there is any error committed, it will be discovered on a comparison with the books and can be traced to its source." (Alfred D Chandler Jr, "The Visible Hand", 1977)
"If responsibility - and particularly accountability - is most obviously upwards, moral responsibility also reaches downwards. The commander has a responsibility to those whom he commands. To forget this is to vitiate personal integrity and the ethical validity of the system." (Roger L Shinn, "Military Ethics", 1987)
"Perhaps nothing in our society is more needed for those in positions of authority than accountability." (Larry Burkett, "Business By The Book: Complete Guide of Biblical Principles for the Workplace", 1990)
"Corporate governance is concerned with holding the balance between economic and social goals and between individual and communal goals. The governance framework is there to encourage the efficient use of resources and equally to require accountability for the stewardship of those resources. The aim is to align as nearly as possible the interests of individuals, corporations and society." (Dominic Cadbury, "UK, Commission Report: Corporate Governance", 1992)
"Accountability is essential to personal growth, as well as team growth. How can you improve if you're never wrong? If you don't admit a mistake and take responsibility for it, you're bound to make the same one again." (Pat Summitt, "Reach for the Summit", 1999)
"Responsibility equals accountability equals ownership. And a sense of ownership is the most powerful weapon a team or organization can have." (Pat Summitt, "Reach for the Summit", 1999)
"There's not a chance we'll reach our full potential until we stop blaming each other and start practicing personal accountability." (John G Miller, "QBQ!: The Question Behind the Question", 2001)
"Democracy is not about trust; it is about distrust. It is about accountability, exposure, open debate, critical challenge, and popular input and feedback from the citizenry." (Michael Parenti, "Superpatriotism", 2004)
"No individual can achieve worthy goals without accepting accountability for his or her own actions." (Dan Miller, "No More Dreaded Mondays", 2008)
"In putting together your standards, remember that it is essential to involve your entire team. Standards are not rules issued by the boss; they are a collective identity. Remember, standards are the things that you do all the time and the things for which you hold one another accountable." (Mike Krzyzewski, "The Gold Standard: Building a World-Class Team", 2009)
"Nobody can do everything well, so learn how to delegate responsibility to other winners and then hold them accountable for their decisions." (George Foreman, "Knockout Entrepreneur: My Ten-Count Strategy for Winning at Business", 2010)
"Failing to hold someone accountable is ultimately an act of selfishness." (Patrick Lencioni, "The Advantage, Enhanced Edition: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business", 2012)
"We cannot have a just society that applies the principle of accountability to the powerless and the principle of forgiveness to the powerful. This is the America in which we currently reside." (Chris Hayes, "Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy", 2012)
"Artificial intelligence is a concept that obscures accountability. Our problem is not machines acting like humans - it's humans acting like machines." (John Twelve Hawks, "Spark", 2014)
"In order to cultivate a culture of accountability, first it is essential to assign it clearly. People ought to clearly know what they are accountable for before they can be held to it. This goes beyond assigning key responsibility areas (KRAs). To be accountable for an outcome, we need authority for making decisions, not just responsibility for execution. It is tempting to refrain from the tricky exercise of explicitly assigning accountability. Executives often hope that their reports will figure it out. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)
"Some hierarchy is essential for the effective functioning of an organization. Eliminating hierarchy has the frequent side effect of slowing down decision making and diffusing accountability." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)
"Accountability makes no sense when it undermines the larger goals of education." (Diane Ravitch, "The Death and Life of the Great American School System", 2016)
"[...] high-accountability teams are characterized by having members that are willing and able to resolve issues within the team. They take responsibility for their own actions and hold each other accountable. They take ownership of resolving disputes and feel empowered to do so without intervention from others. They learn quickly by identifying issues and solutions together, adopting better patterns over time. They are able to work without delay because they don’t need anyone else to resolve problems. Their managers are able to work more strategically without being bogged down by day-to-day conflict resolution." (Morgan Evans, "Engineering Manager's Handbook", 2023)
"In a workplace setting, accountability is the willingness to take responsibility for one’s actions and their outcomes. Accountable team members take ownership of their work, admit their mistakes, and are willing to hold each other accountable as peers." (Morgan Evans, "Engineering Manager's Handbook", 2023)
"Low-accountability teams can be recognized based on their tendency to shift blame, avoid addressing issues within the team, and escalate most problems to their manager. In low-accountability teams, it is difficult to determine the root of problems, failures are met with apathy, and managers have to spend much of their time settling disputes and addressing performance. Members of low-accountability teams believe it is not their role to resolve disputes and instead shift that responsibility up to the manager, waiting for further direction. These teams fall into conflict and avoidance deadlocks, unable to move quickly because they cannot resolve issues within the team."
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