犯错者地位如何影响同事容错？——任务目标偏离度和团队互依性的作用

A critical factor which inhibits employees or teams from learning from their errors is negative interpersonal responses from coworkers. Although previous literature has recognized the significance of creating a good error management climate, the interpersonal error responses between coworkers are largely neglected, and the process by which this climate is formed remains unknown. Moreover, research on error management climate focuses more on concerted responses to employees' work errors and overlooks the fact that employees with different status may receive different levels of error tolerance. In this research, we draw on affective events theory and expectation violation theory to explore the interpersonal consequence of employees' work error by focusing on the responses of coworkers. We conducted a scenario-based experiment with 518 full-time employees to test our theoretical model. The results reveal that an error maker's status will diminish coworkers' negative affect toward him or her, and thus enhance their error tolerance (indicated by a lower punishment tendency and a higher desire for future cooperation). Furthermore, we find that this relationship is affected by the degree of deviation from task objectives caused by the error. Specifically, when the deviation is low rather than high, an error maker's status exerts a more pronounced effect on (a) alleviating the negative affect of coworkers and (b) increasing coworkers' tolerance towards his or her error. The same pronounced pattern holds when team interdependence is high rather than low. This research makes several important theoretical contributions to the literatures on error management, status and affective events theory and the findings have important practical implications for the error management of teams. First, we contribute to error management research by probing into coworkers' responses toward employees' work error. The existing error management literature generally reveals that a good error management climate has positive effects on both employees and organizations. Yet, we know little about how this climate is formed. As the daily interactions between team members determine the formation of team climate, a prerequisite for constructing a positive error management climate is to understand how coworkers respond to employees' work error. By exploring how error tolerance is affected by the status of the error maker, we provide a more comprehensive understanding of the interpersonal consequences of employees' work errors within the team, as well as some preliminary exploration of the micro- process underlying the formation of the error management climate. Second, although theoretical and review articles have proposed a protective effect of individual status, few studies have examined such effects. We empirically investigate the protective effect of individual status as well as its boundary conditions through a comprehensive framework which simultaneously integrates error makers' status, error characteristics, and team characteristics. We find that the protective effect of status disappears when the deviation of task objectives is high and team interdependence is high. In doing so, we expand our understanding of the effects of individual status. Third, we extend the application of affective events theory to the interpersonal interactions between coworkers. Finally, we also provide some important practical applications for error management within teams. The research findings reveal that team leaders need to be aware of error makers' status, the specific characteristics of the work error, and team characteristics simultaneously, so as to more effectively manage the responses of other team members and thus facilitate the formation of a good error management climate within team.