Jonas Dahl

Over the past few decades, increasing attention has been devoted to understanding how errors and failures influence various aspects of organizations. Effectively managing and learning from failures has proven critical for improving performance, enhancing safety, and driving innovation. Despite this, many organizations face challenges addressing failures, as employees often hesitate to discuss them due to negative emotional reactions. This reluctance creates a substantial barrier to learning and continuous improvement. While existing research primarily explains employees’ decisions to communicate errors and failures through a cognitive lens, the emotional dimensions remain underexplored. This thesis investigates individuals´ failure-sharing in complex business services, emphasizing the interplay between emotional dynamics, cognitive processes, and organizational influences. Specifically, the thesis explores how psychological factors such as cost-benefit evaluations, shame and guilt, individual mindsets, and self-compassion, alongside organizational norms and values, are involved in employees´ decisions to share failures. By addressing these dimensions, the research provides a nuanced understanding of the individual and organizational-level antecedents influencing failure-sharing behaviors. This research contributes to the error management literature by complementing its traditionally cognitive focus with emotional dynamics. Through an exploratory qualitative study and two quantitative hypothesis-testing studies, the thesis uncovers how shame negatively and guilt positively influence perceptions and behaviors in failure-sharing decisions. Furthermore, it highlights how these emotional dynamics are influenced by organizational norms and mindsets, providing a comprehensive framework for understanding error and failure communication within organizational contexts. Practical implications are also presented.

Failure sharing represents potential for error management cultures and organizational learning but may be resisted by the individuals involved. Previous research suggests that one qualifying factor is the perceived benefits and costs for the individuals doing the sharing. In the current paper, based on theories of self-conscious emotions, we propose that there is also emotional impact on the failure sharing process, where the experience of shame and guilt impacts both failure-sharing tendencies and perceptions of the benefits and costs associated with failure sharing. In addition, based on mindset theory, we propose that fixed organizational and individual mindsets contribute to arousing shame and guilt in a failure situation. Two correlational online studies largely supported the hypotheses. The emotional effects on failure sharing were also found to be partly mediated by the benefit/cost perceptions. These findings contribute to the literature on error management, failure sharing, and organizational mindsets.

Providers of complex business services often focus on creating positive experiences to manage their clients' impressions and their consultants' self-esteem. This, however, creates challenges to sharing errors. Based on case studies of two consulting organizations, both explicitly committed to positivity, we explore how consultants make decisions about error sharing. We discover two versions of positivity (trait based and experience based), which are coupled with two different organizational mindsets (fixed vs. growth). These pairs shape an organization's view of errors, and they create different cultural contexts for error sharing. With trait-based positivity and a fixed organizational mindset, the predominant emotion when committing errors was shame; only costs of error sharing were seen, and errors were shared only with a small group of trusted peers. With experience-based positivity and a growth organizational mindset, the predominant emotion instead was guilt; both costs and benefits of error sharing were considered, and errors were shared more widely. These findings contribute to research on error management by laying the ground for further theorizing about the relationship between organizational norms and values, emotions, cost-benefit considerations, and decisions about error sharing. They also hold implications for managers regarding how to emphasize the positive without muting error sharing.

Vi har ställt oss frågan vad det är som får människor att dela sina framgångar och misslyckanden med kollegor – en viktig källa till lärande och social hållbarhet på arbetsplatser. Vi har särskilt undersökt vad som främjar respektive hindrar erfarenhetsdelning i sammanhang där mycket står på spel i termer av försörjning och karriärmöjligheter. För att få svar på frågan har vi undersökt två kunskapsintensiva konsultföretag och vilka överväganden konsulterna gör vid beslut att dela eller inte dela erfarenheter. Studien konstaterar att konsulternas huvudsakliga övervägande vid delningsbeslut är potentiell imagerisk snarare än potentiell nytta. Studien identifierar fem dimensioner som påverkar konsulternas bedömning av potentiell imagerisk: normkonformitet, möjligt kunskapsbidrag, relationskvalitet, samt status- och imageberoende.