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Organizational research missed managerial ignorance concealment (MIC) and the low-moral careerism (L-MC) it served, leaving a lacuna in managerial stupidity research: MIC serving L-MC was not used to explain this stupidity. The purpose of this paper is to remedy this lacuna.

A semi-native longitudinal multi-site ethnography of automatic processing plants, their parent inter-kibbutz co-operatives (I-KC-Os) and their kibbutz field context enabled a Strathernian ethnography that contextualized the prevalence of MIC and L-MC.

I-KC-Os’ oligarchic context encouraged outsider executives’ MIC and L-MC that caused vicious distrust and ignorance cycles, stupidity and failures. A few high-moral knowledgeable mid-managers prevented total failures by vulnerable involvement that created virtuous trust and learning cycles. This, however, furthered dominance by ignorant ineffective L-MC executives and furthered use of MIC.

As managerial know-how portability is often illusory and causes negative dominance of ignorant outsider executives, new CEO succession norms and new yardsticks for assessing fitness of potential executives are required, proposed in the paper.

Oligarchic contexts encourage MIC and L-MC, hence democratization is called for to counter this negative impact and promote efficiency, effectiveness and innovation.

Untangling and linking the neglected topics of MIC and L-MC explains, for the first time, the prevalence of these related phenomena and their unethical facets, particularly among outsider executives and managers, emphasizing the need for their phronetic ethnographying to further explain the resulting mismanagement.

This study evaluated the practical relevance of the academic literature on international human-resources management (IHRM). To this end, 304 IHRM articles published in nine academic and eight practitioner journals during 1991–2000 were examined. Results suggested that academics and practitioners varied in their focus on HR topics, geographical regions, and cultural vs. institutional variables. In addition, academics were interested in individual level outcomes as opposed to practitioners, who were primarily concerned with organizational performance. Finally, citation patterns revealed little interaction between academics and practitioners, and academics appeared to be unconcerned with discussing the practical implications of their work.

Pluralistic ignorance is defined as a situation in which an individual holds an opinion, but mistakenly believes that the majority of his or her peers hold the opposite opinion. The purpose of this paper is to refocus attention on pluralistic ignorance as an important, applied, and multilevel concept to organizational researchers by developing a theory of pluralistic ignorance in organizational contexts.

The paper reviews the literature with regard to the causes and consequences (for individuals, groups and organizations) of pluralistic ignorance and develops an integrated understanding of how pluralistic ignorance influences employees and organizations.

The paper finds that pluralistic ignorance is a complex phenomenon that has important consequences for organizations with relation to behavior of individuals.

The development of a model of pluralistic ignorance, with research propositions, will assist researchers seeking to conduct research on this topic.

This paper is original in that it is the first to delineate the processes underlying pluralistic ignorance in a managerial/organizational context.

This paper explores critical failure factors (CFFs) in the context of knowledge sharing. It provides further insights into what can cause knowledge- sharing failures, inflexible knowledge-sharing strategies and ineffective knowledge- sharing mechanisms. It also examines how practitioners can reduce or even mitigate such dysfunctions.

A case-based inductive approach was conducted. Data were collected from two studies applying mixed methods. The first data set included nine in-depth, semi-structured interviews with highly skilled personnel from an aerospace and defense organization. The second data source included 375 successfully completed questionnaires from participants employed at the same organization.

The paper identifies six CFFs with an impact on knowledge sharing. It also reveals that managing organizational ignorance can play a key role in generating new knowledge and averting failure. Study findings provide insights into the importance of identifying these failures when sharing knowledge and propose relevant mitigation strategies.

This paper identifies a range of empirically validated CFFs that complement the extant work on the complexity of knowledge sharing and have hitherto not been seen in the literature. It also provides a more nuanced understanding of why both organizations and their people often fail to share knowledge by exploring the role of organizational ignorance.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how professionals, like doctors, deal with their ignorance? Which strategies do they apply? How can the organization support activities that encourage dealing with ignorance in a positive way? The paper shows how ignorance can be managed in professional organizations like hospitals.

To explore this touchy subject, the research follows a sequential mixed method design. The advantage of combining research methods is the opportunity to explore an uninvestigated research field. In the first exploratory research sequence (empirical study 1) preliminary questions were defined by means of 43 qualitative semi-structured interviews with hospital physicians and literature analysis. The results of the qualitative content analysis also served as a starting point for the development of a Germany-wide online-questionnaire survey with more than 2,500 physicians (empirical study 2).

The results show that breaks, a lack of negative organizational constraints, collective learning, positive role models and intrinsic motivation have the highest impact on ignorance sharing of physicians in hospitals. In reverse, negative organizational constraints, distrust, a lack of intrinsic motivation and omitting the implementation of evidence-based insights in terms of collective learning have the highest impact on hiding ignorance. These findings help to manage ignorance in a positive way.

Physicians all over the world have to deal with incomplete information and ignorance in their daily work. Mostly, they have no time and/or resources to gather all relevant information before they make a diagnosis or administer a therapy. It is quite evident that scientific discourses on knowledge management and professions mostly emphasize the power of expertise and knowledge, whereas research on ignorance is currently more or less neglected. This paper is one of the first attempts to overcome this research gap.

Drawing on the literature on professional ignorance, here defined in affirmative terms as the capacity to act regardless of the incompleteness of available information in organizations and professional communities, the article reports empirical material from an urban development project wherein policy makers' instructions are vague and, in certain domains, inconsistent with market conditions.

Urban development projects regularly include uncertainty and risk taking, and policy makers' stated objectives regarding project goals may be incomplete or merely signal a political ambition. In such situations, first-line project participants need to make decisions as if uncertainties regarding policy objectives are manageable and preferably minimal. The purpose of the article is to substantiate the proposition that professional ignorance is a key mechanism in incomplete or imperfect governance systems.

Project participants actively questioned policy but acted on the instructions just the same, which is indicative of how professional ignorance is supportive of governance system that relies on first-line market actors and agencies to implement also incomplete or vaguely stated policy objectives. Incomplete policies derive from challenges in political deliberation and bargaining processes, uncertainty regarding the future and shifting preferences among policy makers and constituencies more widely. In practice, incomplete policies regularly include issues for first-level actors (e.g. on the urban development project level) to handle and to reconcile in their day-to-day work.

On basis of an empirical study of a major urban development project, the study contributes to a growing literature that recognizes the value of professional ignorance in governance systems and in project management practice. The study invites further scholarly research that takes an affirmative of professional ignorance but without overlooking its risks and potential malfunctions.

The purpose of this paper is to identify individual variables with an impact on knowledge sharing and explore the under-discussed construct of employees’ ignorance. This can enhance the knowledge-sharing process and facilitate the development of greater intellectual capital.

Eighty-four dependent variables affecting knowledge sharing are analyzed and classified into 11 categories. In addition, the direct effect of employees’ ignorance on knowledge sharing is introduced and empirically investigated in a case study of a multinational organization operating within the aerospace and defense industry.

The findings suggest that employees’ ignorance may negatively affect their intention to share knowledge, thus leading to poor decision-making and communication in organizations. Employees’ ignorance could also limit the organizational ability to repel external threats, implement innovation and manage future risks.

A classification scheme based on different categories of employees’ ignorance is developed, providing tailor-made recommendations for practitioners facing different types of ill-informed organizational scenarios. Further, the need to shift the emphasis away from the management of knowledge to the management of ignorance is also an important contribution of this paper.

This paper examines the historical development of pluralistic ignorance as a construct and its application to organizational studies. Pluralistic ignorance is a social comparison error where an individual holds an opinion, but mistakenly believes that others hold the opposite opinion. Pluralistic ignorance was first developed as an important social construct in the 1920s by social psychologist Floyd Allport, and has been applied to myriad settings in psychology and sociology, including racial segregation, student perceptions of alcohol use, and classroom behavior. Despite work in pluralistic ignorance for over 75 years, it has only recently been applied to management settings. Management scholars have suggested applications of pluralistic ignorance to decision‐making, business ethics, group dynamics, performance appraisal, and burnout. Other management applications are proposed as a means to guide research in pluralistic ignorance in the future.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how professionals learn from varying experiences with errors in health-care digitalization and develop and use negative knowledge and digital ignorance in efforts to improve digitalized health care.

A two-year qualitative field study was conducted in the context of a public health-care organization working with digital patient communication. The data consisted of participant observation, semistructured interviews and document data. Inductive coding and a theoretically informed generation of themes were applied.

The findings show that both health-care and digital communication professionals learn through experiences with digital “rule-” and “knowledge-based” errors in patient communication and develop negative knowledge and awareness of digital ignorance. In their joint efforts, they use negative knowledge to “bend the rules” and to explore digital ignorance in efforts to improve patient communication.

This study provides insight into the importance of collaboration between professionals with varying experience of errors in digitalizing patient communication. Such collaboration is required to acknowledge own shortcomings and create complementary negative knowledge to improve digital patient communication. This is particularly important when working with innovative digitalization in health care.

In this study, the concept of organizational stupidity (OS) and different aspects of the OS is analyzed, and a conceptual model for the OS is proposed.

The data for the OS study were collected by interviewing the employees of the Iran Revenue Agency (IRA), Isfahan Province Branch. The snowball method was used for sampling and data collection. The data collected from interviews are analyzed using MAXQDA (a software for qualitative data analysis).

After analyzing the data, a conceptual model for the OS is proposed using the grounded theory (GT). The proposed model contains all factors influencing the OS and the relationship among them. The accuracy of the proposed OS model is confirmed using structural validity, external validity, descriptive validity and interpretive validity. The reliability of the proposed OS model is approved using the Holstie, Miles and Huberman reliability equation. The proposed model shows the casual conditions, interfering factors, contextual factors and main phenomena leading to OS and predicts the strategies and consequences of the OS.

This model can be used to plan strategies for managing and reducing OS in organizations.