Treating errors as workplace goal-nonattainment, and applying the cognitive theories of rumination, we investigate how employees’ daily error commission may affect their learning outcomes (i.e., next-day task efficacy) through two after-work ruminative processes: maladaptive rumination (i.e., affective rumination) and adaptive rumination (i.e., problem-solving pondering). Furthermore, we posit that the effect of daily error commission on these ruminative processes depends on the extent to which individuals consider their errors as goal-nonattainment, which we argue will be affected by error controllability and perceived error management climate. In a 10-day experience sampling investigation of 109 employees (N = 1,090), we found that daily error commission is negatively related to next-day task efficacy via affective rumination, and is positively related to next-day task efficacy via problem-solving pondering. Furthermore, we found both error controllability and perceived error management climate mitigate the negative link between error commission and next-day task efficacy via affective rumination, such that the negative indirect relationship was weaker under either higher error controllability or higher error management climate. Error controllability was also found to mitigate the positive link between error commission and next-day task efficacy via problem-solving pondering, such that the positive indirect relationship was weaker under higher error controllability. Our study contributes to theory and practice by elucidating the processes and outcomes related to individuals’ learning from errors at work.
