You may fail but won’t quit? Linking servant leadership with error management culture is positively associated with employees’ motivational quality

Research on positive associations between servant leadership, basic need satisfaction (BNS), and employees’ work motivation is well-established. From a self-determination theory perspective, we argue that servant leadership behavior is not only positively associated with BNS but also with how errors are perceived and managed in an organization. In previous studies, error management culture (EMC) was shown to positively affect firm performance. However, research on antecedents of EMC in organizations is scarce. Thus, we conducted two studies and tested a research model (total sample size N = 1,306) proposing a serial mediation of EMC and BNS for the relationship between servant leadership and five forms of employee motivation according to self-determination theory. Results replicate previous research on the positive association between servant leadership and BNS. Expanding existing findings, we found evidence for a positive relationship between servant leadership and EMC. In addition, the relationship between servant leadership and three different motivation types (i.e. amotivation, identified, and intrinsic motivation) was serially mediated by EMC and BNS in both studies. These findings offer important practical implications, as previous studies on error management mainly focused on the outcomes of EMC but did not investigate the relationship between EMC and servant leadership or BNS. In addition, the results suggest that an organization should be considered as a whole. Besides the leadership style, EMC should be taken into account since it turned out to be a relevant predictor of BNS, too.