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Why good people do bad things: A retrospective on the Hubble fiasco

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Executive Overview After reading in this issue of AME “Hubble error: Time, money and millionths of an inch,” we expected that many readers would want to try to understand what happened and why. Anticipating this reaction, we asked prominent management scholars and consultants for their comments. What follows is a first installment. Editor

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... Organizational goals-both implicit and declared targets that serve to translate organization strategy to actual plans, closely reflecting top management values and expectations -are likely to strongly influence members' job performance and productivity levels. However, the pursuit of organizational goals may also encourage employee misbehavior, particularly when they are conflicting, highly demanding, vague, or unrealistic (Stein & Kanter 1993) and are supported by a strong culture or by "neurotic" (Kets de Vries & Miller 1984) executives. Ackroyd and Thompson (1999), for example, posited that employee misconduct is mostly a form of protest against arbitrary managerial control. ...
... stated findings on human failure are applied to organizational improvement initiatives, like quality improvement and preventive maintenance programs. The system thinking analyses and simulation runs highlight two different levels of human failure—i.e. (stage 1) planning and design of the sociotechnical-environment and (stage 2) on-line operations. Stein & Kanter (1993) analyze the Hubble fiasco, which exhibits some similarities to the stage 1 of human failure of the Chernobyl accident. They find that the Hubble fiasco is not " at its most fundamental level, a story about bad or even misguided people doing bad things; it's a story about good people doing bad things. " (Stein and Kanter 1993: 60). Accor ...
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