Leaders inevitably commit errors at work, but little is known about what happens to followers’ perceptions of leaders when leaders share their errors. Treating error sharing as sensitive information disclosure, we apply the sensitive self-disclosure framework to propose that leader error sharing is positively related to followers’ evaluations of leader ability and integrity, which ultimately enhance followers’ perceptions of leader effectiveness. We also propose that the above positive relationships will be moderated by followers’ leader-oriented perfectionism. Across two studies (i.e., a field study with 98 leaders and 398 members from 98 teams, and a scenario-based experiment with 320 participants), we found support for the view that leader error sharing is positively related to leader effectiveness perceptions via enhanced ability and integrity evaluations. Further, we found that the positive indirect relationship between leader error sharing and leader effectiveness via ability evaluation is mitigated when followers have higher leader-oriented perfectionism. Our study contributes to the leadership and error sharing literature by revealing whether leaders’ error sharing benefits or harms their image in the eyes of their followers.
