Project Details
Projekt
The Microfoundations of Error Reporting: A Mixed Methods Approach
Subject Area
Accounting and Finance
Term
from 2017 to 2021
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 356398314
Errors made by employees can cause severe harm not only to organizational performance, but also to the public good - most notably to employee well-being and customer safety. Errors, defined as decisions and actions that result in an undesirable and avoidable gap between an expected and an actual state that might compromise organizational effectiveness or efficiency, occur in all industries. Their consequences, however, are most far-reaching in so called high-reliability contexts such as aviation, mining, and healthcare. Central to the Behavioral Theory of the Firm is the idea that organizations are able to learn from negative performance feedback that might have its root cause in human errors. Scholars assume that employees share negative feedback with their superiors in a timely and accurate manner. In reality, however, upward flows of negative information are often delayed, ambiguous, sugarcoated, or even partly or fully suppressed. Given the considerable importance of error reporting, it is striking to note how limited extant theory and evidence on error reporting still are.The main purpose of this grant proposal is to initiate an ambitious research program on the microfoundations of error reporting. It will combine field studies and experiments - both in the laboratory as well as in Virtual Reality - to uncover salient factors associated with the individual propensity to report an error observed in the workplace. We move the organizational reporting culture center stage and build a comprehensive conceptual framework on the determinants of individual error reporting. In particular, we seek to identify those factors that are most salient in determining the individual decision to report - or not - an error observed at work. Special emphasis will be placed upon identifying salient obstacles to individual error reporting and examining the effectiveness of a positive, no-blame reporting culture as a remedy. We distinguish between organizational, individual, error, reporting, task, and peer attributes that we expect to jointly shape individual error reporting behavior.Given the inherent complexity of the phenomenon as reflected by the plethora of distinct attribute sets expected to determine individual error reporting decisions, an integrated mixed methods approach appears vital. Depending on the specific research question, we will first conduct lab or virtual reality experiments to isolate the basic causal effects in a controlled laboratory environment. We will then provide external validity and greater granularity by means of field studies better equipped to do justice to the complexity of the error reporting phenomenon.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
