Operational failures occur in all industries with consequences that range from minor
inconveniences to major catastrophes. Many organizations have implemented incident reporting
systems to highlight actual and potential operational failures in order to encourage problem
solving and prevent subsequent failures. Our study is among the first to develop and empirically
test theory regarding which reported operational failures are likely to spur problem solving. We
hypothesize that problem solving activities are especially likely to follow reported operational
failures that provoke financial and legal liability risks. We also hypothesize that management
commitment to problem solving, enacted through managers’ communication and engagement
practices, can encourage frontline workers to conduct problem solving. We test our hypotheses in
the health care context, in which the use of incident reporting systems to highlight operational
failures is widespread. Using data on nearly 7,500 reported incidents from a single hospital, we
find support for our hypotheses. Our findings suggest that frontline workers’ participation in
problem solving is motivated by some inherent characteristics of the problems as well as by
particular management practices.