Everyone makes mistakes but not everyone hides them: Why being mindfully authentic can reduce the pressure to hide errors

Making mistakes is human and yet despite the inevitability of errors, much of the error literature has focused on how errors can be prevented, or how organizations can encourage their people to learn from errors. Unfortunately, if an error is hidden, it cannot be learned from and even small undetected errors can lead to major disasters. In order to investigate what people can do to decrease the need to hide errors, this research examined whether a mindfulness training might help manage the difficult feelings that lead to error hiding.

Employees from a set of Toronto hospitals were randomly assigned to either a mindfulness training, a Pilates group (active control), or a no-treatment control group and completed both surveys and interviews. When looking at change over time, we found that mindfulness was linked to error hiding through authentic functioning. We analyzed the interviews to better understand why only participants in the mindfulness training experienced this boost in their willingness to be themselves and further, why being authentic would explain decreases in error hiding. Our results revealed that together, mindfulness and authenticity encourage people to be more accepting of their whole (imperfect) self and enable people to be less defensive when errors occur. The importance of being kind to oneself when mistakes take place should not be underestimated. To learn more, see the full article:

Choi, E., Leroy, H., Johnson, A. & Nguyen, H. (2022). Flaws and all: How mindfulness reduces error hiding by enhancing authentic functioning. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 27(5), 451-469. doi: 10.1037/ocp0000327 (external link) .