The leadership–error culture connection: an exploratory study on negative leadership styles

Errors are common within organizations and an adequate error culture is pivotal to preventing errors and learning from them. Leaders are acknowledged as the most influential actors in organizations to shape their culture, hence our aim is to examine how different leadership profiles can influence error aversion (EAC) and error management (EMC) cultures. We reached 388 employees (48.7% females). An ESEM model was run to assess the factorial structure of the leadership scales and a Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) was used to examine leadership profiles, showing four profiles: positive (POS), corrective-abusive (CAB), passive (PAS) and passive-abusive (PAB). Regressions to investigate leadership profiles’ relations with different error cultures showed that negative leadership profiles (CAB, PAS and PAB) were negatively associated with EMC (R2=.17), and positively associated with EAC (R2=.24), also showing specific effects related to EAC’s components. Our findings suggest that when leaders are abusive and laissez-faire, employees tend to cover errors and feel strained from them; conversely, they are discouraged to communicating their errors and learning from them. Cross-sectional data and a general sample suggest additional research.