Active learning climate and employee errors: The moderating effects of personality traits EITAN NAVEH 1 * , TAL KATZ-NAVON 2 AND ZVI STERN 3 1 Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management, Technion—Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel 2 Arison School of Business, The Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya, Israel 3 Hadassah Hebrew University Medical Center, Jerusalem, Israel Summary This study developed and tested a cross-level model of the relationship between two components of active learning climate—enactive exploration and guided learning—and employee errors, and the moderating roles of the individual’s traits of openness to experience and conscientiousness. The study examined the medical errors made by 142 resident physicians in 22 hospital departments. Results demonstrated significant interac- tions between climate and traits: when an individual had a low level of the trait of openness to experience, there was a curvilinear relationship between enactive exploration climate and number of errors. With a high level of openness to experience, the enactive exploration climate was positively associated with the number of errors up to a certain point. In addition, when an individual had a low level of conscientiousness, there was a negative association between guided learning climate and number of errors; with a high level of conscien- tiousness, there was a positive association between guided learning climate and number of errors. Thus, indi- vidual performance was better when the climate complemented the individual’s lack of a trait. When the level of the individual’s trait was high, the climate intensified the already pronounced trait up to an extent that im- paired the individual’s performance. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Keywords: learning; climate; errors; openness to experience; conscientiousness Introduction Employee errors can harm organizational performance (Reason, 1997; Van Dyck, Frese, Baer, & Sonnentag, 2005). Errors are incorrect actions of commission or omission that result from lack of knowledge, as well as unintended deviation from plans, goals, or feedback processes (Reason, 1997). The impact of employee errors in the healthcare industry may have grave repercussions because the consequences of an error are liable to become a life-and-death issue (Kohn, Corrigan, & Donaldson, 1999; Leape et al., 2009). 1 In order to reduce employee errors, employees need to improve their skills through learning (e.g., Argote, 1999; Edmondson, 1999; Edmondson, Dillon, & Roloff, 2008). Specifically, some employees, such as professionals in general or physicians in the healthcare setting, have no alternative to learning by doing, and they must actively participate in their learning processes while performing their daily work (Bell & Kozlowski, 2010). The present study focuses on this type of learning. The active learning ap- proach is grounded in the constructivist vision of learning that argues that learning is an inductive process in which individuals explore and experiment with a task in the aim of inferring the rules, principles, and strategies of effective performance. Active learning is characterized by the extent to which learners have responsibility for managing, ini- tiating, and controlling their learning activities and decisions about what to explore and when to seek guidance (Bell & Kozlowski, 2010). *Correspondence to: Eitan Naveh, Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management, Technion—Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa 32000, Israel. E-mail: naveh@ie.technion.ac.il 1 Medical treatment errors are defined as errors in the performance of an operation, procedure, or test; in the administration of treatment; in the diagnosis of a patient; and in the dosage or method of using a medication (Kohn et al., 1999; Leape, 2002). Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Received 29 July 2013 Revised 21 December 2014, Accepted 29 December 2014 Journal of Organizational Behavior, J. Organiz. Behav. 36, 441–459 (2015) Published online 6 March 2015 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/job.2000 Research Article