Public organizations have little tolerance when it comes to risks and errors. At the same time, environmental, technological, and demographic changes call for new ways of doing things to improve public sector performance. Achieving this may involve trial and error. Therefore, there is a need to effectively combine risk management and error management practices. However, the concepts tend to be intermingled and confused, which hinders public managers from deliberately exercising one or the other managerial behavior, or productively combining them. The purpose of this article is to theoretically disentangle risk management from error management. We argue that risk management is a prospective leadership behavior, while error management is a retrospective one. In our theoretical framework, we describe both concepts according to their temporal, behavioral, and normative characteristics. Testable propositions are developed regarding the theorized differences between the two concepts and their associated behaviors, and we discuss ways in which the two concepts can be applied in order to advance future research and, ultimately, improve the way public organizations respond to risks and errors.

中文翻译：

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理清公共部门的风险管理和错误管理：理论框架

公共组织对风险和错误的容忍度很低。与此同时，环境、技术和人口变化需要新的做事方式来提高公共部门的绩效。实现这一目标可能需要反复试验。因此，需要将风险管理和错误管理实践有效地结合起来。然而，这些概念往往是混合和混乱的，这阻碍了公共管理者有意地实施一种或另一种管理行为，或有效地将它们结合起来。本文的目的是从理论上将风险管理与错误管理分开。我们认为风险管理是一种前瞻性的领导行为，而错误管理是一种回顾性的领导行为。在我们的理论框架中，我们根据这两个概念的时间、行为和规范特征来描述它们。针对这两个概念及其相关行为之间的理论差异提出了可检验的命题，我们讨论了这两个概念的应用方式，以推进未来的研究，并最终改进公共组织应对风险和错误的方式。