Collective responsibility or collective guilt is the responsibility of organizations, groups and societies. Collective responsibility in the form of collective punishment is often used as a disciplinary measure in closed institutions, e.g., boarding schools (punishing a whole class for the actions of one known or unknown pupil), military units, prisons (juvenile and adult), psychiatric facilities, etc. The effectiveness and severity of this measure may vary greatly, but it often breeds distrust and isolation among their members. Historically, collective punishment is a sign of authoritarian tendencies in the institution or its home society.

In ethics, both methodological individualists and normative individualists question the validity of collective responsibility. Normally, only the individual actor can accrue culpability for actions that they freely cause. The notion of collective culpability seems to deny individual moral responsibility. Contemporary systems of criminal law accept the principle that guilt shall only be personal. According to genocide scholar A. Dirk Moses, "The collective guilt accusation is unacceptable in scholarship, let alone in normal discourse and is, I think, one of the key ingredients in genocidal thinking."

As the business practices known as corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability mature and converge with the responsibilities of governments and citizens, the term "collective responsibility" is beginning to be more widely used.^{[citation needed]}

Collective responsibility is widely applied in corporations, when an entire workforce may be held responsible for failing to achieve corporate targets (for example, profit targets), irrespective of the performance of individuals or teams which may have achieved or overachieved within their area. Collective punishment, even including measures that may further harm the prospect of achieving targets, is applied as a measure to 'teach' the workforce.

The concept of collective responsibility is present in literature, most notably in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", a poem telling the tale of a ship's crew who died of thirst after they approved of one crew member's killing of an albatross.

1959's Ben-Hur and 1983's prison crime drama Bad Boys depict collective responsibility and punishment. The play An Inspector Calls by J. B. Priestley also features the theme of collective responsibility throughout the investigation process.

In some countries with parliamentary systems, there is a convention that all members of a cabinet must publicly support all government decisions, even if they do not agree with them. Members of the cabinet that wish to dissent or object publicly must resign from their positions or be sacked.

As a result of collective responsibility, the entire government cabinet must resign if a vote of no confidence is passed in parliament.