The Microfoundations of Error Reporting: A Mixed Methods Approach

员工所犯的错误不仅会对组织绩效造成严重损害，还会对公共利益造成严重损害——最明显的是对员工福利和客户安全造成严重损害。错误被定义为导致预期状态和实际状态之间出现不希望出现的、可避免的差距的决策和行动，这种差距可能会损害组织的有效性或效率，在所有行业中都会发生。然而，在航空、采矿和医疗保健等所谓的高可靠性环境中，它们的影响最为深远。企业行为理论的核心思想是，组织能够从消极的绩效反馈中学习，而这些反馈的根本原因可能是人为错误。学者们认为员工会及时准确地将负面反馈反馈给上级。然而，在现实中，向上流动的负面信息往往被延迟、模糊、粉饰，甚至部分或全部被压制。考虑到错误报告的相当重要性，令人惊讶的是，关于错误报告的现有理论和证据仍然是多么有限。这项拨款提案的主要目的是启动一个雄心勃勃的研究项目，研究错误报告的微观基础。它将结合实验室和虚拟现实的实地研究和实验，以揭示与个人倾向报告工作场所观察到的错误相关的显著因素。我们将组织报告文化移到中心舞台，并建立了一个关于个人错误报告决定因素的综合概念框架。特别是，我们试图找出那些在决定个人决定报告或不报告工作中观察到的错误时最显著的因素。将特别强调确定个人错误报告的突出障碍，并审查积极、无责备报告文化作为补救措施的有效性。我们区分了组织、个人、错误、报告、任务和同伴属性，我们期望这些属性共同塑造个人错误报告行为。考虑到该现象固有的复杂性（由期望确定单个错误报告决策的大量不同属性集所反映），集成的混合方法方法显得至关重要。根据具体的研究问题，我们将首先进行实验室或虚拟现实实验，在受控的实验室环境中隔离基本的因果关系。然后，我们将通过更好地对错误报告现象的复杂性进行公正处理的实地研究，提供外部有效性和更大的粒度。

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.