Managing for high reliability: The relationship of collective mindfulness and managerial communication with social-exchange perceptions, performance, and creativity

The modern world of work presents managers with a business environment marked by increasingly high levels of ambiguity. Succeeding within the face of such ambiguity requires a high degree of effective sensemaking and creativity within teams. High-reliability theory and related frameworks suggest a number of ways in which managers can successfully manage the unexpected, but these propositions have focused primarily on safety outcomes, have not considered the important role of managers as actors in this process, and have yet to be incorporated into the mainstream leadership literature despite their applicability. Addressing that void, this study proposes and finds preliminary evidence for a multilevel theoretical model integrating high-reliability theory and the leadership literature to examine relationships of team collective mindfulness and team manager openness with employee creativity among a sample of 100 employees nested within 20 teams. As such, these findings suggest distinct ways in which the tenets of high-reliability theory may apply in generalized management situations, while extending the theory to involve non-safety-related outcomes such as creativity. Practical implications of this study include the identification of communication styles that managers may use to encourage creative performance.