Change management: what does silence about errors mean?
During organisational change, dashboards record known incidents, rarely the difficulties that nobody dares to mention. The management question is specific: how can errors become discussable early enough to adjust implementation?
What the literature establishes
Amy C. Edmondson (1999, Administrative Science Quarterly) identifies an association between team psychological safety and learning behaviour. Psychological safety refers to a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking, including acknowledging an error or asking for help. For change management, these findings suggest examining the conditions under which difficulties are reported, rather than interpreting their apparent absence as success.
Status can inhibit speaking up
Ingrid M. Nembhard and Amy C. Edmondson (2006, Journal of Organizational Behavior) study healthcare teams and link leader inclusiveness to psychological safety and engagement in improvement efforts. Their findings also suggest that inclusiveness reduces differences in psychological safety associated with professional status. Explicitly inviting contributions and showing appreciation for them therefore matters particularly when not all voices carry equal weight.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that encouraging everyone to speak up is enough to make a transformation succeed. These studies establish neither that this is sufficient nor that quality requirements are unnecessary: being able to report an error does not remove the need to address it. An increase in reports may reflect a lower interpersonal risk in speaking up, more problems, or both; the number alone cannot distinguish between them. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot promise
These field studies do not provide experimental proof of the effects of an error-reporting arrangement during a transformation. Associations observed in work teams and healthcare teams do not guarantee the same result in a food-processing company or a university service. In practice, counting reports without examining how they are handled risks rewarding information collection rather than learning.
A practical check in Fribourg
As part of SHR's « Conduite du changement » programme, one possible exercise would be to monitor an implementation in a food-processing company, a bilingual industrial team or a service within Fribourg's university hub. During a four-week pilot, record difficulties reported in French or German, their reporting date, the person responsible for handling them and the response provided. The proposed measure is the proportion of reports receiving, within seven days, a documented response specifying the action decided upon or the reason for taking no action. This deadline is a management convention, not a scientific threshold; verification relies on the records in the log, without treating the indicator as a measure of psychological safety. To go further: explore the Change Leadership training in Fribourg, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Change Leadership in Fribourg
- change leadership
- Fribourg
- research
- training fribourg