The Safety a Leader Cannot Grant: Why Building an Innovation Culture in Thai Local Administrative Organizations Must Begin with the Audit Process

Abstract

There is broad agreement in the literature that the principal barrier to digital transformation in Thai local administrative organizations is organizational culture rather than technology, and that the decisive cultural feature is risk aversion. The standard prescription follows almost automatically: leaders should build psychological safety, permit experimentation and adopt a fail fast posture. This academic article argues that the prescription misidentifies who holds the relevant authority. Psychological safety, as originally theorised, is a team-level condition that presupposes the leader controls the consequences of error. In Thai local administrative organizations the leader does not: the consequences of an unconventional decision are determined by external audit and anti-corruption bodies over which no mayor or chief administrator has jurisdiction. An executive who promises staff that they may experiment without fear is therefore making an assurance that lies outside the executive's power to honour. The article further observes that legal protection already exists, since Section 8 of the Act on Liability for Wrongful Acts of Officials B.E. 2539 confines personal liability to intent or gross negligence, which implies that the binding constraint is not legal exposure but the procedural cost of being questioned, a cost incurred even when the official is eventually cleared. The article proposes the concept of a safety-authority gap and a three-tier model distinguishing what local executives can change themselves, what requires central regulators, and what requires legislative amendment.