My boss is bad: Organisations, CEOs, staff - they're all victims

Chetan Dhruve continues with his series looking at issues with leadership, this time concluding that bosses, in the final analysis, are victims of the system too.

Imagine you're in hospital undergoing treatment for something serious. Understandably, you're anxious. Above all else, you don't want someone to make a mistake. And you have good reason to be anxious: medical errors kill thousands of people every year. The odds of dying in a hospital in the developed world because of mistakes are a horrifying 33,000 times higher than the odds of dying in an air crash, according to this Guardian article.

But if a health professional knows a medical error is being made, you'd assume that at the very least, the individual would speak up. Does this happen? Let's look at research by Harvard professor Amy Edmonson, who studied how leadership and co-worker relationships affected drug-treatment errors in nursing units.