ABSTRACT
Errors at work are usually perceived as negative events. Errors can have costly consequences leading to negative emotions, to loss of time, and even to severe economic collapses or catastrophes, such as the Chernobyl meltdown. Therefore, people tend to avoid errors altogether. However, that may not always be possible and may have the counterproductive effect of learning little from those errors that do occur. Long-term productivity may be negatively affected if people do not learn from errors (van Dyck et al. 2005). Therefore, a new training procedure was developed — error management training — with a view to understand the function of errors for training. Errors are useful learning devices and should therefore be explicitly incorporated into the training process.
