Learning Versus Punishment And Accountability
Our guest today is Jeffrey Pfeffer, Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. We find it intriguing, given the current obsession with “accountability” in education reform. It is reprinted with permission from Dr. Pfeffer’s blog, Rational Rants, found athttp://www.jeffreypfeffer.com.
People seem to love to exact retribution on those who screw up—it satisfies some primitive sense of justice. For instance, research in experimental economics shows that people will voluntarily give up resources to punish others who have acted unfairly or inappropriately, even though such behavior costs those doing it and even in circumstances where there is going to be no future interaction to be affected by the signal sent through the punishment. In other words, people will mete out retribution even when such behavior is economically irrational.
All of this would be of only academic interest except it plays out in the organizational world in ways that often inhibit learning from mistakes and preventing future mishaps. Consider, for instance, the horrendous BP oil spillin the Gulf of Mexico. There were many entities involved on the oil rig and drilling in deep water is a complex engineering task. As BP CEO Tony Hayward repeatedly stated during his ill-starred congressional testimony, the cause, or more likely, the causes (plural) of the accident remain to be fully understood. And, of course, i