This thesis presents a research study, conducted for my PhD. This research used mixed qualitative and quantitative methods to address four central questions: How do interdisciplinary team members perceive error and error reporting? How do patients perceive error and error reporting? What are the areas of congruence and conflict between different healthcare professionals' approaches to error and patients' needs and perspectives? Why are certain events not described as errors and not addressed in a systematic fashion that would improve patient safety? This study was conducted in the grounded theory tradition and included two phases. The first phase investigated the perceptions of OR team members and patients regarding error definition and error reporting; the second phase sought to elaborate two of the dominant themes from the first phase.The first three chapters of this thesis provide background information about the context, theoretical foundation, and design of the research. The following three chapters present the results of the study in the form of three self-contained articles that have been published or submitted to academic journals. The first of these articles describes and compares surgical team members' and patients' perceptions of error, its reporting, and its disclosure from the first phase of the study. It is published in the journal Surgery. The second article explores operating room (OR) nurses' error reporting preferences from the second phase of the study. This article has been submitted to an applied nursing research journal. The third article sought to probe the factors influencing whether team members saw error events in everyday work as problematic or whether they rationalized such occurrences to support the status quo. The analysis draws on three concepts from organizational and psychological theory to explore team members' responses to these error scenarios. This article has been submitted to the journal Quality and Safety in Healthcare. The final chapter draws the three papers together into an extended discussion about the significance and future implications of this work.