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Although organizations appear to learn from obvious failures, we argue that it is harder for them to learn from "near-misses"--events in which chance played a role in averting failure. In this paper, we formalize the concept of near-misses and hypothesize that organizations and managers fail to learn from near-misses because they evaluate such events as successes and thus feel safer about the situation. We distinguish perceived ("felt") risk from calculated statistical risk and propose that lower levels of perceived risk encourage people with near-miss information to make riskier subsequent decisions compared to people without near-miss information. In our first study, we confirm the tendency to evaluate near-misses as successes by having participants rate a project manager whose decisions result in either (a) mission success, (b) near-miss, or (c) failure. Participants (both students and NASA employees and contractors) give similar ratings to managers whose decisions produced near-misses and to managers whose decisions resulted in successes, and both ratings are significantly different from ratings of managers who experienced failures. We suggest that the failure to hold managers accountable for near-misses is a foregone learning opportunity for both the manager and the organization. In our second set of studies, we confirm that near-miss information leads people to choose a riskier alternative because of a lower perceived risk following near-miss events. We explore several alternative explanations for these findings, including the role of Bayesian updating in processing near-miss data. Ultimately, the analysis suggests that managers and organizations are reducing their perception of the risk, although not necessarily updating (lowering) the statistical probability of the failure event. We speculate that this divergence arises because perceived risk is the product of associative processing, whereas statistical risk arises from rule-based processing.risk, inference, decision making

We offer the concept of multicommunicating to describe overlapping conversations, an increasingly common occurrence in the technology-enriched workplace. We define multicommunicating, distinguish it from other behaviors, and develop propositions for future research. Our work extends the literature on technology-stimulated restructuring and reveals one of the opportunities provided by lean media-specifically, an opportunity to multicommunicate. We conclude that the concept of multicommunicating has value both to the scholar and to the practicing manager. Scenario 1: At five o'clock in the afternoon (local time), a crew drilling for oil in Indonesia encounters a problem. The field engineer contacts a twenty-four-hour-a-day technology center in Texas (local time, four o'clock in the morning). The engineer in Texas-with access to multiple communication technologies-interacts with two other engineers while responding to queries from Indonesia. Within forty-five minutes the engineer in Texas has worked out a solution and communicated it to the crew in Indonesia (Amin et al., 2001). The company estimates that such practices save the company more than $200 million per year (Smith et al., 2001). Scenario 2: While supervising employees and receiving occasional calls from friends, a manager, Trina, has to respond to complex questions from executives engaged in legally binding negotiations. "What commonly happens for me [is] I'm typing an email and the phone rings so I'll take the conversation [and] while I'm on the telephone. .. [also send a chat message to] somebody at the same time. So you have like three things going at once. In some cases. .. [I lose track] of what the person on the phone is saying and they can be irritated. .. [because] they have to repeat themselves." Trina added that a mistake "could be very detrimental." (We interviewed Trina and several other experienced multicommunicators during the preparation of this paper.) The preceding examples point to an emerging trend in workplace communication-the use of technology to participate in several interactions at the same time (Cameron & Webster, 2005). We call this practice "multicommunicating" (cf. Turner & Tinsley, 2002), which we define as engaging in two or more overlapping, synchronous conversations. The first scenario shows how multicommunicating can contribute to performance; the second points to problems, including inefficiency, irritation, and mistakes. Multicommunicating is facilitated by technologies, particularly chat software. But technologies do not determine behavior. They are, as Barley explains, only "occasions that trigger social dynamics" (1986: 81). Management scholars, therefore, have drawn on structuration theory

In this article the authors investigate the relationship between culture and joint gains by examining the role of information sharing and power strategies in intracultural negotiations. Previously, the authors found that the relationship between cultural values or norms and joint gains was uncertain in six cultures: France, Russia, Japan, Hong Kong, Brazil, and the United States. Of the five values and norms measured, only norms for information sharing in negotiation were directly related to joint gains. This article explores and extends prior findings by investigating the strategies used by negotiators in the same six cultures. Cultures that maximized joint gains used direct information‐sharing strategies or a combination of indirect and direct strategies. Power strategies may help or hurt joint gains, depending on a culture's values and norms for power and whether or not power‐based influence is used in conjunction with sufficient information exchange. The findings suggest that understanding the other party's cultural characteristics and strategies can help negotiators plan how to focus on information exchange and deal with unusual power strategies that they may encounter.