You're in a situation where you're working as a group, and every group member is busy with their assigned duties. However, during the course of the exercise, one of your group members fails to complete one of his assigned tasks, out of carelessness and lack of attention. It's not intentional, but you end up producing a faulty product.

The product is returned to you, and your manager begins yelling at you, thinking that it was your fault, even though it was the fault of your co-worker's, who has no idea what went wrong.

Should you correct the manager and send his anger, and possibly consequences onto the man who is truly responsible, or simply take the blame for somebody else to expedite the process?

Essentially, this argument boils down to the following:
Is it better to be perfectly clear in assigning duties and limits, and rewarding those exactly for what they've produced, or is it more preferable to let details wash by for the sake of speed?

This is highly opinionated; we will never agree on an answer. But me, being particularly machiavellistic, would absolutely choose to put that blame on him. It was his mistake. He deserves to take the consequences for it. That's just the way it's supposed to be. He shouldn't be allowed to just escape his mistakes by putting them on me-- and I'm sure as hell not going to allow it.

So, yeah. There's my rant.

Expedite the process of what, someone getting yelled at for a mistake? I don't see how anyone benefits by letting him yell at the wrong person. It's a waste of everyone's time and no one learns anything.

expedite the manufacturing process.

If you take the blame for it, you let the manager yell at you and you continue with the work.

If you correct him, there's going to be time lost as blame is truly distributed, and the manager tries to get to the bottom of it. Also, there's a sense of insubordination if you correct your supervisor.

I don't know, I would think the managers would be responsible for expediting the manufacturing process, which he's interrupting with his hissy fits that aren't even directed at the right people.

What about the guy that slacked off? He got to be lazy and suffered zero consequences because of it, I guarantee you he'll do it again if nothing is done about it.

Since my manager's the one failing to do his job properly in this example, I'd talk to his boss if possible.

wait what

I believe in taking one for the team depending on if the risk out weighs the consequences. Given this scenario, I wouldn't risk my own career over someone else's, so I would explain the details and have everything worked out the way it should have been. Again, it's sort of dependent on the circumstances. I mean it really depends on the person and what they might be going through or their status at work. If your career could handle a stern talking to better than someone elses then it wouldn't necessarily be wrong to help them out by covering for them once. At the end of the day, though, it's always me over anyone else.

It depends if that person helped me and I haven't paid that debt. If I haven't, I'd take the blame for myself but if I already did, I'll give the blame to him. But for me, I would him if I knew him and he is a kind person to me. But if I know him or not and he's kind of a rude guy, I wouldn't attempt to take that blame. So yeah, like everyone says, it's opinionated.

I wouldn't take the risk of being insubordinate to the boss. I'd rather take the blame and chew out the coworker myself than risk getting fired.

I'd take the blame. It'll make things go by faster, which should be good.