Innovation capability of the company: the roles of leadership and error management

Abstract

Extensive research has been conducted promoting empowerment, inclusive decision making, and self-determination by employees. However, where does an organization initiate change if employees stay in their comfort zone and rather have a work-to-rule mentality? They just do not take over responsibility and the power they are given. The inductive case study involved first-hand data about leader-member exchange and corporate culture. A qualitative research approach was selected by employing personal construct psychology to receive an unbiased cultural view of employees and leaders interacting. A sample of 61 repertory grid structured interviews with 21 leaders and 40 employees produced 782 unique personal assessment criteria. The applied methodology allows a quantitative analysis of these assessments in association with leadership, error management, and employees' proactive behavior. This unusual psychological-based approach chosen as intuitive interviews predicated on personal construct psychology is unlikely to provoke socially desirable or questionnaire-driven results. Based on the case study findings, a systematic review of contemporary scientific literature was conducted to generate broadly applicable results. The final qualitative synthesis included 41 research articles relevant to the investigated topic. Theoretical and empirical results allowed concluding that leadership vulnerability supports error management and employees' psychological safety. These combinations are prerequisites to proactive behavior. Additional preconditions to proactivity are employee resilience and organizational commitment. This article's results could give practical recommendations in case organizations lack the proactive behavior of their workforce. Finally, this article advocates further research on vulnerability in leadership and managers communicating their own weaknesses and mistakes as it is an underrepresented area in current scientific literature.

Disentangling Risk Management and Error Management in the Public Sector: A Theoretical Framework

“…In this way, error management is not only important in organizations that deal with potentially catastrophic errors, such as the field of aviation, medicine, or nuclear plants, but also in organizations where errors are related to minor harm. All errors cause inefficiencies, and learning from them makes practices more efficient and innovative (Birkinshaw et al, 2008; Bundtzen & Hinrichs, 2021; van Dyck et al, 2005), and relatedly, the quality of internal processes and service delivery increases. At the same time, in the age of algorithmic decision-making and automated processes, errors do usually not just concern single cases, where a case worker made a wrong decision by applying the wrong rules for example, but a bigger number of cases handled by a wrongly trained or programmed algorithm, leading to major harm (as seen for example in the so-called Dutch childcare benefit scandal, Alon-Barkat & Busuioc, 2023).…”

How Managing Errors Facilitates Entrepreneurial Orientation: The Mediating Role of Ambidextrous Leadership

“…Frese and Keith (2015) posit that people take more initiatives and act proactively in organizations where error management is high. It is suggested that the atmosphere created by error management where employees look for assistance for the errors promotes employees' proactive behaviors (Bundtzen and Hinrichs, 2021). Farnese et al (2020) reveal that employees who consider errors as inevitable and evaluate them as commensurable risks approach errors positively.…”