Heroes, Organizations and High Reliability

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Abstract
Organizational research has shown many cases where organizational ‘heroes’are honoured, and heroic tales are used not only in the process of building organizational reliability and performance, but for clarifying organizational values and culture and transmitting them from one generation to the next. Some high‐reliability organizations studied also display these properties; yet, there are some that are actively ‘anti‐heroic,’disparaging individual exploits. An inquiry into the role of heroes and heroics in organizations leads to a typology by which hero‐avoiding and hero‐seeking organizations can be characterized and shows that both types are adaptations to their particular technical and functional environments. A great deal more remains to be learned about the dynamics of organizations seeking and maintaining reliability in very demanding circumstances before we can fully understand how the balance between holistic control and heroics might be chosen.

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