Zhike Lei

Errors are a recurring fact of organizational life and can potentially yield either adverse or positive consequences. Organizational researchers and practitioners alike have become increasingly interested in understanding the causes of errors and the coping strategies that foster organizational success. Although we have learned much about errors in specific research areas across specific organizational contexts, we know little about how multifaceted forces in organizations, especially when they contradict each other, might affect the pathways of errors in organizations. This review strives to integrate the literature on errors, not only by summarizing conceptual foundations and empirical findings, but also by discussing discrepancies, inconsistencies, and opportunities for research synthesis via level of analysis, temporal dynamism, and priority lenses. At the core of this integrative review is a call for future research to explain how to reduce the underlying causes and negative consequences of errors while promoting positive outcomes and learning benefits in organizations. We close this review by offering suggestions that help develop an integrative, rather than isolated, investigation of errors in organizations.

Previous research asserts that teams working in routine situations pass through performance episodes characterized by action and transition phases, while other evidence suggests that certain team behaviors significantly influence team effectiveness during nonroutine situations. We integrate these two areas of research—one focusing on the temporal nature of team episodic performance and the other on interaction patterns and planning in teams—to more fully understand how teams working in dynamic settings successfully transition across routine and nonroutine situations. Using behavioral data collected from airline flight crews working in a flight simulator, we find that different interaction pattern characteristics are related to team performance in routine and nonroutine situations, and that teams engage in more contingency, in-process planning behavior during routine versus nonroutine situations. Moreover, we find that the relationship between this in-process planning and subsequent team adaptiveness is curvilinear (inverted U-shaped). That is, team contingency or in-process planning activity may initially increase team adaptiveness, but too much planning has adverse effects on subsequent performance.