Abstract
The literature on error sharing has focused on employees’ cost–benefit assessment to predict whether employees will disclose self-made errors. Our study advances this line of research by adopting a different theoretical lens and examining leaders’ role in promoting employee error sharing. Drawing primarily upon social learning theory, we expected that when team leaders openly talk about their own errors within teams, through their behavior, they would set an example for team members and encourage members’ error sharing with team leaders. Based on a sample of 353 employees within 95 teams, we found a positive link between leader error sharing and team member error sharing; in addition, we found that ethical leadership evaluation partially mediates this positive link. Moreover, we found that leader error sharing was positively related to the team error management climate, which moderated the relationship between ethical leadership evaluation and team member error sharing in such a way that the positive relationship becomes stronger under a higher error management climate. Our findings highlight the critical roles played by leaders in promoting employees’ error sharing.
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Data Availability
Data relevant to this study is available upon reasonable request.
Notes
Five teams failed to return their responses due to business travel during the on-site data collection.
We defined error sharing as one’s general behavioral tendency, which captures the extent of error sharing relative to actual error occurrence. Therefore, self-evaluation is more accurate than others’ evaluation, as others may notice only the frequency of error-sharing behavior while not being able to tell the extent of error sharing relative to actual error occurrence.
Before collecting the data, we asked four experts (two professors and two junior faculties in I-O psychology) to evaluate whether the five items could capture leader error-sharing behavior well. The rwg5 was .94, indicating that this five-item scale captures well the structure that is expected to be captured. We collected an independent sample to test the item validity for this scale. One hundred and fifty supervisors from a manufacturing company participated in this preliminary test. On average, the participants were 42.56 years old (SD = 6.05) and had worked in the organization for 19.2 years (SD = 7.90); among them, 52% were female. EFA results showed that leader error sharing explained 67.88% of the total variance with factor loadings greater than .63. Reliability for this scale was .88.
Since rwg has several limitations (e.g., high dependence on the number of scale anchors, high dependence on the sample size, and valid null distribution assumption [see LeBretion & Senter, 2008]), we thus applied awg indices. We also calculated rwg indices: rwgmean = .93, and rwgmedian = .98, which also supported data aggregation to the team level.
Similar to the leader error-sharing scale, we did pretests to be sure about the scale validity of team member error sharing. The same four experts were asked to indicate whether the five items could well capture team members’ error-sharing behavior. Rwg5 was .97, indicating high agreement and suggesting that the five-item scale can well capture team members’ error-sharing behavior. An independent sample for team member error-sharing scale was collected to do the EFA. Data were collected from a sample of 512 frontline employees (a 93.10% response rate) from different industries (16.60% from medical, 32.42% from service, and 50.98% from manufacturing). On average, the participants were 35.21 years old (SD = 9.38) and had worked in the current organizations for 2.44 years (SD = 1.59); among them, 36.35% were female. The EFA results showed that error sharing explained 69.37% of the total variance with factor loadings greater than .75. The reliability for this scale was .88.
We also checked the robustness of our findings by removing all the controls. Results stayed virtually the same. Detailed results are available at https://osf.io/6jrhx/?view_only=b25991e2345943cdb22be112abf6e4e8.
We calculated rwg indices for team psychological safety: rwgmean = .83, and rwgmedian = .93, which also supported data aggregation to the team level.
We specified a comparison model in which error management climate and ethical leadership were combined (χ2(df = [77] = 605.73, CFI = .76. TLI = .69, RMSEA = 0.14; ∆χ2∆df = 5[= 487.49, p < .001], a comparison model in which ethical leadership and employee error sharing were combined (χ2[df = 77] = 8 94.32, CFI = 0.63. TLI = .51, RMSEA = .17; ∆χ2 [∆df = 5] = 776.08, p < .001), and a comparison model in which error management climate and employee error sharing were combined (χ2[df = 77] = 653.47, CFI = .74. TLI = .66, RMSEA = .15; ∆χ2[∆df = 5] = 535.23, p < .001). The above models fit significantly worse than our hypothesized model.
We thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this point.
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This research was partially supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (71902061, 72272011) and SSHRC Insight Grant No. 435-2021-0618 (Canada).
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Zhang, K., Zhao, B. & Yin, K. When Leaders Acknowledge Their Own Errors, Will Employees Follow Suit? A Social Learning Perspective. J Bus Ethics 189, 403–421 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-023-05329-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-023-05329-9