Leadership profiles and error cultures: navigating the pathways to workplace errors through a person-centered approach

Leaders significantly shape organizational culture and determine collective efficacy, which includes managing errors. They can act as role models to encourage team members' engagement by framing mistakes as opportunities for learning instead of hiding or punishing them. Scholars widely recognize that both leadership and culture have a significant impact on employee performance. However, only a few studies have explored the simultaneous influence of these factors on performance, and the nature of these relationships remains unclear. Furthermore, few studies have empirically investigated the association between leadership, error culture, and workplace errors. Thus, this study explores whether and how different profiles of leadership behavior influence error culture approaches, thereby influencing the occurrence of errors. Our aims are a) to identify potential profiles of leadership styles by employing a person-centered approach and b) to examine how a range of leadership profiles are associated with different cultural approaches toward errors, thus paving the way to workplace errors. We identified four leadership profiles with specific contributions to the error culture approach. The model, tested with an SEM mediation analysis on a sample of 388 Italian workers, showed that a) the different styles contribute to the error-handling process by differently affecting the error management, strain, and covering approaches to errors and that b) their relationship with workplace errors is fully mediated by cultural approaches to errors. The findings support an integrative perspective on leadership, with leaders embodying multiple leadership styles, each configuration expressing a different interplay among styles and uniquely affecting cultural approaches to workplace errors.