608 research outputs found

    What Determines Civil Servants’ Error Response? Evidence From a Conjoint Experiment

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    To err is human and learning from mistakes is essential for finding viable solutions to grand societal challenges through development and innovation. Yet, public organizations often exhibit a punitive zero-error culture, and public employees are stereotyped as error and risk-averse. Little is known about the underlying behavioral mechanisms that determine civil servants’ likelihood of handling errors positively, namely reporting and correcting them instead of ignoring and hiding them to avoid blame. Based on the transactional theory of stress coping, we argue that individuals’ error-handling strategies relate to both rational and emotional evaluations of error-specific and consequential contextual factors. Using a conjoint survey experiment conducted with N = 276 civil servants in Germany ( Obs. = 1,104), this study disentangles the effects of error-related, individual, and organization-cultural factors as decisive drivers of individuals’ error response. We find that error characteristics (type and harmfulness) determine error-handling behavior, which is revealed to be independent from organizational error culture and individual error orientation, providing important and novel insights for theory and practice

    SWIM START STANDPOINTS ON THE OSB11 STARTING BLOCK

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    Systematic variations of the preferred stance positions of 17 elite swimmers on the OSB11 were analyzed in regard to block time, swim start times to 5 m, horizontal take-off velocities, and horizontal vs. vertical peak force values. The variations encompassed changes of the front leg (left vs. right), the centre of mass (CM) height (low vs. high), the stance width (narrow vs. wide), and a rear vs. a front weighted stance. For half of the subjects, at least one stance alter-native provided a better swim start time than the preferred stance with an average gain of 0,06s and extreme improvements of up to 0,14s. The majority of the improvements were associated with a change to the front weighted stance, a narrow foot displacement, and an elevated CM position
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