“The good news about bad news”: Information about past organizational failure and its impact on worker productivity

Failure in organizations is very common. Little is known about whether leaders should provide feedback about past organizational failure to followers and how this might affect their future performance. We conducted a field experiment (Experiment 1) in which we recruited temporary workers to carry out a phone campaign to attract new volunteers and randomly assigned them to either receive or not to receive information about a failed mail campaign pursuing the same goal. We find that informed workers performed better, regardless of whether they had previously worked on the failed mail campaign or not. Evidence from a second field experiment (Experiment 2) with students asked to voluntarily support a campaign for reducing food waste corroborates the finding. We investigate the role of leadership tactics behind our findings in a third online survey experiment (Experiment 3). We conclude that feedback about past failure is unlikely to have a negative impact on work performance ―it might even lead to performance improvement― if leaders make use of approaches such as charismatic and identity leadership when communicating the bad news. To guarantee the anonymity of subjects, potentially identifying variables (such as subjects’ age and the number of terms enrolled) are deleted from the publicly available datasets. Hence, some of the results presented in the article cannot be replicated entirely. The full datasets are available upon request.组织层面的失败屡见不鲜，但目前学界对领导者是否应当向下属反馈过往组织失败的相关信息，以及此类反馈会如何影响下属未来的工作绩效，仍知之甚少。我们开展了第一项实地实验（实验1）：招募临时工作人员开展电话推广活动以招募新志愿者，并将其随机分为两组，一组可获知此前一场追求同一目标却失败的邮件推广活动的相关信息，另一组则无法获取该信息。研究结果显示，获知该失败活动信息的工作人员表现更优，无论其是否曾参与过那场失败的邮件推广活动。第二项针对学生群体的实地实验（实验2）——要求学生自愿支持减少食物浪费的推广活动——的相关证据也印证了这一发现。我们通过第三项线上调查实验（实验3），探究了支撑本研究结论的领导策略作用机制。本研究最终得出结论：若领导者在传递坏消息时采用魅力型领导与身份认同型领导等方式，那么针对过往失败的反馈不太可能对工作绩效产生负面影响，甚至可能助力绩效提升。为保障研究对象的匿名性，公开可用的数据集中已删除可能识别出研究对象身份的变量（如研究对象的年龄、入学学期数等）。因此，本文中呈现的部分结果无法完全复刻。完整数据集可通过申请获取。