There are some limitations in this study that need to be taken into consideration. Firstly, the sampling of the middle managers in this research is quite small and it is collected from one organization. The participation to the research was voluntary and that is one reason why I didn´t got so many narratives as I expected. It must be considered that the content of the frame story may have limited the amount of the answerers and the sampling of middle managers. I got feedback from one of the middle managers from the subject company and he/she didn´t want to participate because the middle manager felt that the theme and frame story was too difficult to handle and write about, as the topic is quite sensitive.
From this same reason it is possible that the data of this research is gathered from middle managers who fundamentally have a positive opinion towards mistakes and learning from mistakes, or they might have already handled similar situations several times, so it feels more natural to answer to the frame story. One limitation is also the initial setting of the frame story as it was quite narrow and may have guided and limited the narratives of middle managers. Another limitation is the researcher´s experience in processing the data and especially the challenge of content analysis.
Because of the mentioned limitations, this study does not produce a single truth about middle managements mistake-tolerance, but it was not the purpose of this study. The aim of this study was to highlight the important role of learning from mistake and understand the ways how to create a mistake-tolerant atmosphere from a managerial point of view. I wanted to examine the ways of how middle managers deal with mistakes in a real-life situation and for that matter empathy-based stories were a good way to gather data as respondents can use their imagination to describe what has happened before the situation of the frame story (Eskola & Suoranta, 1998.) In this study feelings were in a significant role both in theory and in the data so also from this point of view empathy-based stories were a suitable way to gather data as it gives respondent a possibility to imagine other people’s situation but to also reflect it to their own feelings and describe it based on their own experiences (Eskola & Suoranta 1998, 118.)
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