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1. Introduction
Shortly before noon on January 28th, 1986, a powerful rocket carrying the Challenger space shuttle took off from the John F. Kennedy Space Center in Florida as part of NASA's prestigious space shuttle program. It was the 25th mission in the program that had begun in 1981, and carried seven passengers including an American primary school teacher. A total of 73 seconds into the launch, the rocket exploded and disintegrated over the Atlantic Ocean, killing all its passengers. Scholars and practitioners have analyzed this disaster from multiple perspectives such as ethical ambiguity and failure ([2] Armenakis, 2002; [7] Boisjoly et al. , 1989; [13] Gino et al. , 2009), group think and conflict ([11] Dimitroff et al. , 2005) and organizational reliability ([18] Heimann, 1993). This paper reflects on the Challenger disaster from the perspective of "bounded awareness" - a relatively new concept in the management literature - and offers a set of propositions that relate bounded awareness to tacit knowledge.
The term "bounded awareness" was coined by Max Bazerman and Dolly Chugh ([4] Bazerman and Chugh, 2006a; [5] Bazerman and Chugh, 2006b) building upon [38] Simon's (1957) notion of bounded rationality from the field of behavioural economics. According to them, decision makers are said to experience bounded awareness when they overlook relevant and readily available information, even while using other available information, and take a decision that is either suboptimal or entirely erroneous.
[4] Bazerman and Chugh (2006a) use several business examples to illustrate the idea. Executives at the pharmaceutical company Merck overlooked publicly available information for nearly four years that its pain killer drug Vioxx was possibly causing heart attacks and strokes. By the time they eventually withdrew the drug from the market, it was estimated to have caused extensive harm to its customers and damaged the company's reputation. In another article, [5] Bazerman and Chugh (2006b) note that bounded awareness essentially manifests as "focusing failures" that result from the misalignment between information ideally needed for a good decision and the information actually included in the decision-making process. Useful information - though readily available - remains out of focus of the decision maker. They discuss four literature streams from cognitive and social psychology that provide evidence of conditions leading to focusing...