Re: Collective noun and personal pronoun agreement (e.g., "The staff is deciding how they want to vote.")

Solution 1:

I would call this grammatically wrong (and it sounds awful to me as a native speaker). Staff can be singular or plural, but in this sentence the verb is singular, but the pronoun is plural. Either of these is correct, and the first is the more common usage:

The staff are deciding how they want to vote.

The staff is deciding how it wants to vote.

Solution 2:

So I’m gonna take a detour from English for a little to attempt to explain this in my best understanding.

In Spanish (and other languages, but let’s just say Spanish for now), they do not have this rule. “If the people is good, so is the staff.” See how the last part sounded better than the first? Props to spanish speakers, because they see no difference whatsoever.

Ok back to English. There is somewhat of a blurred line in today’s understanding of these kinds of nouns in particular. The reason behind this is because there are 2 ways to look at words like “family” and “staff”. The first way to look at it is as an ORGANIZATION, and not the people within that organization. E.g. “the staff is welcoming”. This could be interpreted as the cumulative attitude of the staff as a whole “is welcoming”. On the other hand you could interpret as the individuals in the staff “are welcoming”.

The example they use there isn’t a good one because it somewhat has a split meaning. The Spanish got it easy. None of this interpretational nonsense.

Anyway, hope this helps.