Work Life After Failure?: How Employees Bounce Back, Learn, and Recover from Work-Related Setbacks

Setbacks and failures are part of organizational life. While a recent body of literature pointed to the importance of recovery, resilience, and learning from failure in responding to and dealing with setback events, the setback itself and its underlying dimensions remain underexplored. However, how severe employees perceive a setback to be plays an integral role in how successfully they handle these events. Taking an event-oriented perspective on work-related setbacks, this study defines setback severity as the setback event’s novelty, disruptiveness, and criticality. Based on the current literature and prior operationalizations, the authors introduce and validate a three-dimensional measure of setback severity. The exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses provide support for the proposed three-dimensional model. Further analyses show that disruptiveness and criticality are significantly related to identity threat, emotional exhaustion, trauma, turnover intention, and thriving, while novelty is only related to turnover intention and thriving. The implications of the setback severity measure are discussed along with recommendations for future research.

Self-regulation does not only play a pivotal role in coping with job demands and major life events, but also shapes personality development in a way that builds protective resilience, integrative abilities in holistic processing of negative and positive experiences, and autonomous functioning. Therefore, in facing setbacks and failures, intrapsychic self-regulatory mechanisms determine recovery and learning processes, in order to stabilize well-being and ensure psychological functioning. In the present chapter, the author will focus on such self-regulatory mechanisms, which influence coping processes after experiences of failure and setbacks at work. In doing so, the author draw from the Personality–System–Interaction Theory, which provides in-depth insights into different motivational and volitional processes of self-regulation. Firstly, the author elaborates on inter-individual differences in self-regulation, which can be conceptually distinguished into action and state orientation. Whereas state orientation impedes effective coping with setbacks and failures, action orientation enables building resilience and goal-focused self-regulation, especially when employees are confronted with setback experiences. Secondly, the present chapter involves findings on recovery processes and mindsets, which are relevant for the theoretical understanding about the impact of setbacks and failures on employees’ psychological functioning. Thirdly, the author discusses affect modulation as a specific form of self-regulation, which allows for reducing negative affects and increasing positive affects, in order to facilitate holistic and integrative processing of setback experiences. Finally, proceeding from insights into how employees can overcome setback experiences and learn from failure, The author will provide practical implications for human resource management, training, and leadership.

Successful teams tend to be highly cohesive and team cohesion to be particularly helpful in allowing teams and their members to sustain their success even in the most challenging times. One disillusioning consequence of this reciprocity between cohesion and performance would suggest that failures made by teams and/or their members likely jeopardize their success by preventing them from capitalizing on such virtuous circles associated with team cohesion. Yet, many teams uphold their performance despite the failures they have to cope with, suggesting that the potential vicious circles can be overcome. This chapter aims at illuminating the vicious and virtuous circles associated with team cohesion that are induced by either collective failures of teams or individual failures of their members. It therefore offers a multilevel perspective not only on the emergence and diffusion of failures at the individual and team levels, but also on the critical role that team cohesion plays for a team’s (dys)functional coping across these levels. It is theorized that collective failures triggered exogenously can help build team cohesion, and that whether endogenously-triggered collective failures bring about the vicious or the virtuous circles of team cohesion depends on whether the individual failures developing into collective failures are triggered endogenously or exogenously. The implications of this conceptual work are discussed in light of the literatures on error/failure management and group cohesiveness.

Business failure is often described as a Rites of Passage for entrepreneurs. But what does this actually mean? This chapter returns to the original Rites of Passage material, from cultural ethnographers in the early twentieth century. By doing so, the author re-conceptualizes contemporary business failure as the Rites of Business Failure comprising a three-stage transitional process of separation, transition, and incorporation, which has a more socialized and a better understood role in society. Taking a sensemaking perspective, the author portrays the need for greater support for entrepreneurs as they experience business failure and re-establish their life. The author proposes many of the challenges entrepreneurs face over the Rites of Business Failure can be addressed through tailor-made training programs, networks, mentors, and role models which can all be utilized to assist people after the setback of business failure. Theoretically, the chapter contributes to literature on sensemaking and business failure. Practically, it holds implications for policy makers and practicing entrepreneurs.

We are living in turbulent and uncertain times and organizations need to struggle with these circumstances in order to achieve their goals. More than ever, resilience capacity is an added value that organizations need to build to respond to obstacles in these challenging times. Resilience is a capacity of individuals, teams, organizations, communities, even society, that make them to overcome setbacks (such crises, changes, or turbulences) in a way that they not only survive but emerge even stronger. Previous research on resilience at different range of settings and groups show that resilience is a capacity that can be trained or build up. Therefore, the goal of this chapter is to review the main lines of action available to organizations that want to foster resilience at work. The chapter will review theoretical research on workplace resilience, and empirical research that links Human Resources Management and workplace resilience. Aspects covered include the role that corporate social responsibility toward employees, career development or work–family balance have in developing resilience. The chapter closes with a discussion of some practical guidelines for HR managers and practitioners.

This chapter integrates the motivation phenomenon of goal hierarchy and equifinality into the employee resilience conceptualization to highlight adaptive manifestations of resilience to failure at work. Experienced failure offers an important context to consider adaptive resilience, as failure may offer feedback that pre-failure strategies will not lead to higher-level goal accomplishment; making lower-level goal changes critical for success. This chapter offers a fine-gained presentation of what employee resilience does (and does not entail), to address current concerns about: (a) a lack of agreement concerning what “positive adaptation” means; and (b) potential dangers in the unknowing encouragement of maladaptive resilience after failure (e.g., harms to employee well-being and success). Here, goal revision or abandonment at a lower-level of one’s goal hierarchy, as opposed to higher-level goal abandonment, is presented as a form of adaptive employee resilience. This change places the focus of employee resilience on perseverance toward big picture goals, rather than traits or outcomes associated with perseverance; which helps to further distinguish resilience from related concepts, antecedents, and outcomes. This conceptual clarity is useful in furthering the nomological network development of resilience, and better equips researchers and practitioners for assessing and promoting adaptive resilient responses to failure.

To what extent can resiliency reduce negative work outcomes to help employees recover from failure? This study investigates how the interaction of trait resiliency and mistake tolerance play key roles in reducing turnover intention in organizations. Specifically, trait resiliency is hypothesized to be negatively related to managerial turnover intentions. Moreover, the author investigates the interactive role of perceived mistake tolerance as a situational factor that may impact the extent to which resiliency decreases turnover intentions. In a sample of 209 working managers and executives, moderated path modeling reveals that resiliency reduces turnover intentions. Additionally, results suggest a more nuanced view that takes into consideration the interaction of trait resiliency and perceptions of mistake tolerance in reducing turnover intentions.

Negotiation is a ubiquitous part of work-life. As such, negotiations do not occur in a vacuum, which means that we often find ourselves negotiating again and again, in a variety of situations, with varying degrees of success and failure. By taking every opportunity that presents itself, we can learn and develop our negotiation skills further as a result of our cumulative negotiation experiences – especially the more difficult ones. To date, the literature on negotiation and learning from failures has yet to be integrated. In pursuit of this goal, this chapter will firstly, identify the characteristics or specific aspects of a negotiation that could be a setback or failure, and secondly, integrate failures and setbacks into a systematic approach in which we can learn effectively from these setbacks, in which the author applies the literature on learning from failure to specific negotiation setbacks.

The pursuit of entrepreneurial opportunities is not always successful. On the one hand, entrepreneurial failure offers an invaluable opportunity for entrepreneurs to learn about their ventures and themselves. On the other hand, entrepreneurial failure is associated with substantial financial, psychological, and social costs. When entrepreneurs fail to learn from failure, the potential value of this experience is not fully utilized and these costs will have been incurred in vain. In this chapter, the authors investigate how the stigma of failure exacerbates the various costs of failure, thereby making learning from failure much more difficult. The authors combine an analysis of interviews of 20 entrepreneurs (who had, at the time of interview, experienced failure) with an examination of archival data reflecting the legal and cultural environment around their ventures. The authors find that stigma worsens the entrepreneurs’ experience of failure, hinders their transformation of failure experience, and eventually prevents them from utilizing the lessons learnt from failure in their future entrepreneurial activities. The authors discuss the implications of the findings for the entrepreneurship research and economic policies.

There is a dearth of research addressing network failures, and in particular failures of large-scale organizational networks that pursue radical innovation or grand challenges through collaboration. Yet these failures manifestly exist with potential learnings for network participants. In this chapter, the authors consider three major network failures that have been identified in prior research and in the ongoing empirical work. The authors term the failures stalling – not getting started in collaborative work, strategizing – using the network opportunistically to serve other goals than what the network was formed for, and siloing – the network falling short of its collective capacity to learn and innovate due to its lack of connectivity and communication. After describing these three seminal failures in networks of independent organizations, the authors consider the implications for high ambition network collaboration – whether radical innovation or a grand challenge. The authors ask: what do these failures suggest in terms of network participation that would help contribute to network realizing its objective? How should the individual participants of these large-scale organizational networks mitigate failure and maintain the founding ambition, and the performance of the network? What available models for learning are there for the network participants?

Given the uncertain and often disruptive business environment, understanding how employees, teams, and organizations can recover from stress, build long-lasting resilience, and exploit failures as learning opportunities is key for employees’ well-being and organizational success. The book has been organized in three sections, each representing a major domain of inquiry: recovery, resilience, and learning. The chapters within each section elaborate on these domains, and each provides novel ideas and insights. The goal of this chapter is to summarize and integrate some themes and insights offered by the chapters in this book. Based on this summary and integration, the author will illuminate some exciting paths opened up by these chapters, which might be worth exploring further by other scholars in the future. Specifically, future research could benefit from (1) stronger integration of research on recovery, resilience, and learning from failure, (2) better understanding of the role of setbacks, failure, and adversity for recovery, resilience, and learning, and (3) investigations of the role of context for recovery, resilience, and learning from failure.