Creativity-dependent companies often implement failure disclosure programs to encourage employees to publicly disclose failures encountered in exploration activities with a focus on learning. We examine the effects of failure disclosure on employees’ exploration performance using an experiment in which participants perform a letter-search task by counting the search letters in each question (i.e., exploitation) or identifying an embedded shortcut that applies to all questions (i.e., exploration). We manipulate two factors: (1) whether participants are encouraged to disclose their failed attempts at finding the shortcut to future participants and (2) whether they are evaluated for their task-related skills. We predict and find failure disclosure increases the likelihood of shortcut identification in the presence of evaluation, and this effect is mitigated in the absence of evaluation. Because evaluation is typically present in natural work settings, our theory and results suggest failure disclosure is an effective mechanism to increase employees’ exploration performance.

Organizations are increasingly utilizing remote monitoring tools that can track the total time telecommuting employees spend on work activities. We examine whether and how this information can eliminate a specific gender-based bias in the performance evaluations of telecommuting parents. Specifically, managers tend to evaluate telecommuting mothers less favorably than telecommuting fathers when performance outcomes are unfavorable, due to biased effort attribution. The availability of total work-time information can effectively eliminate this bias. Results from our main experiment and four supplemental experiments support our predictions and provide process-level evidence for our theory. Our theory and results suggest that leveraging remote monitoring tools’ capacity to track employees’ total work time can enhance the fairness and effectiveness of performance evaluations for telecommuting mothers.