Who's to blame here?

I'm confident that most problems that companies face can be traced to their culture, as it's the culture that influences employee belief in their company which subsequently determines their behavior. And behavior, of course, determines results. I'm inclined to now issue an "except for" clause after reading the following blurb from the Workplace Law Network. Read this:

"Company culture will be at the centre of a court probe into the first corporate manslaughter prosecution, a top lawyer and leading union officer have warned at a recent British Safety Council (BSC) conference, which examined the responsibilities on directors to prevent injury and ill health to their workers and the consequences of failing to act or getting it wrong." (http://www.workplacelaw.net/news/display/id/18640)

Company culture so dysfunctional, so perverse, so dangerous that it leads to manslaughter? This will be a stretch, I suspect. Now I don't know what the details are yet, but this concerns me on a foundational level. Culture does indeed influence belief and behavior, and I believe most problems can be ascribed to the culture except for individuals who are disturbed, who are sociopaths or suffering from a major traumatic experience in their life. We've read the horrible accounts of workplace violence in many, too many companies, and as far as I remember there was never anything about the corporate culture that seemed to play even a marginal part. Some have been troubled businesses, some successful, and there seems to be no one industry that spawns such behavior (nope, no Going Postal jokes here). Even if a business has a culture with a command-and-control leadership, lousy performance management and poor communication, that does not translate into direct influence on violent behavior. And the threat to the directors who might "get it wrong" and are therefore culpable? Come on. I can think of a lot of areas in which directors screw up but holding them responsible for the violent actions of an individual is dangerously dumb.

Corporate culture explains a lot of things, but manslaughter in the workplace? Here's a thought: maybe there's something wrong with the individual committing the crime. Just a thought.