How Error Prevention and Organizational Silence Influences Managers’ Self-Perception – A Repertory Grid Study

Abstract

The topic of self-perception within management has become a subject catching more and more attention. The necessity for leaders’ self-awareness when aiming at high employee satisfaction and productivity still bears a lot of research potential. Developing self-awareness and efficacy are paths that do not have an end or a quota to reach. It is a rather mindset like a tank that can always be filled up more. Leaders’ self-awareness is crucial to improve their abilities and much more inaccurate self-perception can become harmful for an organisations’ performance. Surprisingly, the influence of managers’ self-perception on leadership behaviour and leadership effectiveness has only been studied little in contemporary literature. The main purpose of this article is to identify organizational factors that influence leader’s self-perception and how an organization can develop this characteristic of their managers. Therefore, this paper aims at identifying corporate cultural causes for managers’ distorted self-perception. This task leads evidently to the topic of organizational silence, which is understood as the absence of upward-directed feedback of employees’ input of ideas. Consequently, a corporate culture inherited by organizational silence impacts a manager’s self-perception. Additionally, the contextual literature research on self-perception guided to the subject of error management. It becomes evident that error management functions as a link between organizational silence and managers’ overestimation. Summarizing the article studies the interlinkages of these three research areas and combined them with a new research and hypothesis model tested on a repertory grid data set consisting of 782 personal constructs of a specific corporate culture. Individual construct psychology was chosen as an investigative methodology to ensure unbiased qualitative results. This psychologically grounded methodology is proven to make socially desirable results unlikely due to the intuitive interview structure. The results of this research give practitioners advice for developing corporate culture and self-perception and efficacy of people in leadership positions.