The Double-Edged Sword of Error Sharing in Organizations: From A Self-Disclosure Perspective

Abstract

Extant research highlights the importance of error sharing for managing errors in organizations, but little work examines what happens to employees who disclose errors. Treating errors as sensitive information, we draw on the self-disclosure literature to propose that error sharing can influence leaders’ evaluations of employee ability and integrity, which affect leader trust in the employee; error visibility and severity work as contingency factors in the above links. We conducted two field studies and one experimental study to test our hypotheses. We used data collected in China from manufacturing companies (560 employees from 71 teams in Study 1), a high-reliability organization (359 employees from 104 teams in Study 2), and an online sample (356 participants in Study 3). Results show that error sharing impairs leader trust via the negative evaluation of the employee's ability but enhances trust via the positive evaluation of the employee's integrity; error visibility and severity moderate the relationships between error sharing and leader evaluation of employee integrity and leader trust such that the positive relationships are enhanced when errors are of lower visibility or higher severity. Our study offers a novel perspective to understand the relational consequences of error sharing at work.