Disentangling Risk Management and Error Management in the Public Sector: A Theoretical Framework

• Published date: 01 August 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/02750740241229996
• Author: Emily Rose Tangsgaard,Caroline Fischer
• Date: 01 August 2024

Disentangling Risk Management and Error

Management in the Public Sector: A

Theoretical Framework

Emily Rose Tangsgaard

1

and Caroline Fischer

2

Abstract

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 man-

agement is a retrospective one. In our theoretical framework, we describe both concepts according to their temporal, behav-

ioral, 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.

Keywords

risk management, error management, accountability, administrative behavior, leadership

Introduction

The role of public organizations is ultimately to implement

political decisions. Politicians, citizens, and stakeholders

expect public organizations to exert accountability by deliv-

ering what has been politically promised and prioritized

(Bovens et al., 2014; Larsen, 2021). For this reason, there

is little tolerance for (potential) failure in the form of risks

and errors in public organizations (Bullock et al., 2019;

Eckerd, 2014; James et al., 2016). At the same time, stake-

holders expect public organizations to be eff‌icient and able

to adapt to external changes, sometimes in innovative

ways. Given these conditions, public organizations are con-

fronted with conf‌licting goals and stakeholder demands:

They should be able to foresee and take no risks, or the

fewest risks possible, but must also try out new procedures

that might come with errors and learn from these errors to

improve practices. These conf‌licting demands mean that

public managers must handle both risks and errors, which

are concepts that are entangled in complex ways.

Take the case of the Covid-19 pandemic. To combat this

health crisis, countries around the world developed mobile

tracing applications (tracing apps) intended to support contact

tracing and help break the chains of infection by tracking

people’s movement (see for instance European Commission,

2023 for an overview of these apps in European countries).

Public organizations had to develop these tracing apps fast

and in somewhat experimental ways, as there were no tem-

plates from previous, similar situations. A key concern

related to the development of these tracing apps was the poten-

tial violation of people’s privacy in case the data on people’s

movement patterns were not deleted or shared with third

parties. A trade-off had to be made, weighing the risks of

poor contact tracing, and thus potentially worsening the pan-

demic, against considerations over data security and people’s

privacy rights. In this way, risks had to be handled related to

the spread of Covid-19 and data security, but also potential

errors related to data security breaches. In the case of the

German tracing app (“Corona-Warn-App”), the initial plan to

store data centrally was criticized by different actors over con-

cerns of data loss and insecure data storage. Discussions about

these risks made the federal government alter the plans in favor

of a decentralized storage solution that stored contact data on

1

Political Science, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

2

Public Administration (PA) within the Faculty of Behavioral, Management &

Social Sciences (BMS), University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands

Corresponding Author:

Emily Rose Tangsgaard, Political Science, Aarhus University, Aarhus,

Denmark.

Email: ertc@ps.au.dk

Article

American Review of Public Administration

2024, Vol. 54(6) 540–554

© The Author(s) 2024

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/02750740241229996

journals.sagepub.com/home/arp