Failure in organizations is very common. Little is known about whether leaders should provide information about past organizational failure to followers and how this might affect their future performance. We conducted a field experiment in which we recruited temporary workers to carry out a phone campaign to attract new volunteers and randomly assigned them to either receive or not to receive information about a failed mail campaign pursuing the same goal. We find that informed workers performed better, regardless of whether they had previously worked on the failed mail campaign or not. Evidence from a second field experiment with students asked to support voluntarily a campaign for reducing food waste corroborates the finding. We explore the role of leadership tactics behind our findings in a third online survey experiment. We conclude that information about past failure is unlikely to have a negative impact on work performance, and might even lead to performance improvement. Implications for future research on the relevance of leadership tactics when giving such information are discussed.

在组织中失败是很常见的。关于领导者是否应该向下属提供有关过去组织失败的信息以及这可能如何影响他们未来的绩效，我们知之甚少。我们进行了一项实地实验，我们招募临时工开展电话活动以吸引新志愿者，并随机分配他们接收或不接收有关追求相同目标的失败邮件活动的信息。我们发现消息灵通的员工表现更好，无论他们之前是否参与过失败的邮件活动。来自要求学生自愿支持减少食物浪费运动的第二次现场实验的证据证实了这一发现。我们在第三个在线调查实验中探索了我们发现背后的领导策略的作用。我们得出的结论是，有关过去失败的信息不太可能对工作绩效产生负面影响，甚至可能导致绩效改进。讨论了在提供此类信息时对领导策略相关性的未来研究的影响。