Promoting employees’ learning from errors by inclusive leadership

Purpose: In today’s complex and challenging work environment, employees’ learning from errors has become critical to organizations’ survival and success. While the literature has highlighted the importance of inclusive leadership for learning behavior in organizations, research on how inclusive leadership promotes employees’ learning from errors has been limited. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to fill this gap by developing and testing a moderated mediation model that emphasizes the key roles of positive mood and gender in the relationship between inclusive leadership and employees’ learning from errors. Design/methodology/approach: A multi-time survey method was used in this study to collect data from 202 full-time employees working in China. Findings: The hypothesized moderated mediation model in this study was supported. Inclusive leadership facilitated employees’ learning from errors through employees’ positive mood, and employees’ gender moderated both the direct relationship between inclusive leadership and employees’ positive mood and the indirect relationship between inclusive leadership and employees’ learning from errors through employees’ positive mood: the relationships were stronger for female employees than for male employees. Originality/value: By incorporating the social role theory into the affective events theory framework, this study may help to open the “black box” of the relationship between inclusive leadership and employees’ learning from errors by explicating the importance of positive mood and gender, thereby shedding light on the timely issues of inclusive leadership, mood, and learning from errors in the workplace.