What determines civil servants’ error response? Evidence from a conjoint experiment
By: Fischer, Caroline and Weißmüller, Kristina S
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Material type: 
BookPublisher: American Review of Public Administration Description: 54(8), Nov, 2024: p.747-770.Subject(s): Error management, Choice-based conjoint, Survey experiment, Transactional theory of stress coping, Employee behavior, Risk governance
In:
American Review of Public AdministrationSummary: To err is human and learning from mistakes is essential for finding viable solutions to grand societal challenges through development and innovation. Yet, public organizations often exhibit a punitive zero-error culture, and public employees are stereotyped as error and risk-averse. Little is known about the underlying behavioral mechanisms that determine civil servants’ likelihood of handling errors positively, namely reporting and correcting them instead of ignoring and hiding them to avoid blame. Based on the transactional theory of stress coping, we argue that individuals’ error-handling strategies relate to both rational and emotional evaluations of error-specific and consequential contextual factors. Using a conjoint survey experiment conducted with N = 276 civil servants in Germany (Obs. = 1,104), this study disentangles the effects of error-related, individual, and organization-cultural factors as decisive drivers of individuals’ error response. We find that error characteristics (type and harmfulness) determine error-handling behavior, which is revealed to be independent from organizational error culture and individual error orientation, providing important and novel insights for theory and practice.- Reproduced
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/02750740241267941
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Articles
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Indian Institute of Public Administration | 54(8), Nov, 2024: p.747-770 | Available | AR135588 |
To err is human and learning from mistakes is essential for finding viable solutions to grand societal challenges through development and innovation. Yet, public organizations often exhibit a punitive zero-error culture, and public employees are stereotyped as error and risk-averse. Little is known about the underlying behavioral mechanisms that determine civil servants’ likelihood of handling errors positively, namely reporting and correcting them instead of ignoring and hiding them to avoid blame. Based on the transactional theory of stress coping, we argue that individuals’ error-handling strategies relate to both rational and emotional evaluations of error-specific and consequential contextual factors. Using a conjoint survey experiment conducted with N = 276 civil servants in Germany (Obs. = 1,104), this study disentangles the effects of error-related, individual, and organization-cultural factors as decisive drivers of individuals’ error response. We find that error characteristics (type and harmfulness) determine error-handling behavior, which is revealed to be independent from organizational error culture and individual error orientation, providing important and novel insights for theory and practice.- Reproduced
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/02750740241267941
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