Works
- Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams, Administrative Science Quarterly, 1999
- Strategies for Learning from Failure, Harvard Business Review, 2011
In Tactics of Organizational Politics
Ideas
A spectrum of reasons for failure. Edmondson argues that managers treat failure the wrong way by assuming it is always bad. She sets out a spectrum of reasons for failure, from blameworthy causes such as deliberate deviance and inattention to praiseworthy ones such as uncertainty and experimentation, and distinguishes preventable failures in routine operations from unavoidable failures in complex work. Most failures are not blameworthy, so organizations learn only if people feel safe to report and analyze them.
What it explains
Edmondson explains why an organization that punishes every failure stops hearing about problems, and why a leader who separates honest failure from misconduct gets earlier and more accurate information.
Tactics that draw on Amy C. Edmondson (1)
In Thinking Tools
Known for
Novartis Professor of Leadership at Harvard Business School. Her 1999 study of 51 manufacturing teams defined team psychological safety, a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking, and found it associated with learning behavior.