Prelims

Half Title Page

Work Life After Failure?

Title Page

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

EDITED BY

GISA TODT

Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich

JULIA BACKMANN

University College Dublin, Ireland

and

MATTHIAS WEISS

Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

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Emerald Publishing Limited

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First edition 2021

Copyright © 2021 Emerald Publishing Limited

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-83867-520-2 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-83867-519-6 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-83867-521-9 (Epub)

Contents

List of Figures and Tables

Figures

Tables

About the Editors

Gisa Todt received her doctoral degree from WHU-Otto Beisheim School of Management. Currently, she is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Leadership and Organization at Ludwig-Maximilians-University (LMU), and a lecturer at Campus M University in Munich. She works for an international Airline where she held different positions. She is a Purser, was a Trainer for Crew Resource Management and worked in the Flight Safety Department, where she worked on the safety and failure culture. Her research interests lie in resilience and failures. She has published in outlets such as Human Relations, Project Management Journal and Journal of Product Innovation Management.

Julia Backmann is an Assistant Professor at the University College Dublin (UCD, Ireland). Before joining UCD, she worked as an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Leadership and Organization at Ludwig-Maximilians-University München (Munich, Germany). She has completed her doctoral studies at WHU–Otto Beisheim School of Management (Vallendar, Germany). Her main research interests include collaboration and leadership in challenging contexts, such as multinational teams or innovative environments. Julia’s research has been published, among others, in the Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of Product Innovation Management, and Leadership Quarterly.

Matthias Weiss, Professor, holds the chair of innovation management and is the Head of the Center for Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Transformation (CEIT) at Ruhr-University Bochum (RUB). Before joining RUB, he worked as an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Leadership and Organization at Ludwig-Maximilians-University München and as post-doc at WHU - Otto Beisheim School of Management (Vallendar, Germany). His main research interests are in the area of teamwork, resilience, and innovation in organizations. His research has been published, among others, in the Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of Product Innovation Management, Human Relations, Leadership Quarterly, and the Journal of Organizational Behavior.

List of Contributors

Foreword

I can still remember my first meeting with Gisa Todt almost 15 years ago – still under her maiden name Gisa Moenkemeyer back then. It was a sunny afternoon and we were sitting in the patio of a nice Italian Restaurant near the Rhine river in Vallendar, Germany. I suggested studying resilience after project failures. “Resilience?” was the first question. Resilience was in a nascent stage in the organizational context back then. The topic of resilience had struck me shortly before, while involved in research on leading through innovation failure – a collaborative project with Liisa Välikangas, who, most fittingly, is one of the contributors to this book. For me it was absolutely clear that we had to combine the innovation context with resilience, as failure is ubiquitous here. Shortly after this decisive lunch meeting, the project started and after just a short while, Matthias Weiss joined our “resilience team” and then, after our research efforts started to intensify, Julia Backmann and eventually Stefan Razinskas and Silja Hartmann came on board. A great research journey was underway, with many ups and downs, of course, and a resilient research team.

Having studied the human side of innovation as well as leadership and teamwork for over two decades, I have come to see the active management of failure as one of the most important (albeit dreadfully neglected) aspects in this area. Yet it was somewhat frustrating to see that research on coping, resilience, and learning from failure mostly resided in distinct literatures that hardly referenced each other, let alone interacted and combined in meaningful ways. That said, I am glad to see that failure-related research has gained so much traction in the management field – with a significant portion of this being of an integrative nature. After all the (ground) work by many researchers in this field over the years, it was long overdue to integrate these research streams. It is truly great to see that this book is doing just that – and does it in such a profound manner. All the authors represented in this book are experts in their fields and have contributed significantly to our understanding of resilience, recovery, and learning from failure in the broader management context. Everyone does their bit to disentangle the mystery of failures within the work context. This book, in turn, helps integrated the pieces to a more complete picture for the interested reader. Seeing all this come together here is indeed very special.

As a reader you will get a great overview of the topic of “work life after failure?!” and of the constituent research streams. Enjoy your reading.

Martin Hoegl

October 2020

About this Book

Failure and setbacks are omnipresent in organizations. They occur regularly at each hierarchical level, in every functional area, in both collective and individual work, and with varying levels of severity. For example, the vast majority of innovation or entrepreneurial endeavors fail (He, Sirén, Singh, Solomon, & von Krogh, 2018; Rauter, Weiss, & Hoegl, 2018; Shepherd & Cardon, 2009), and most managerial actions relevant to implementing organizational change entail the experience of setbacks for many involved individuals in their careers or personal goals (Seibert, Kraimer, & Heslin, 2016). We refer to the word failure as an outcome of an effort that renders the achievement of related goals impossible und unrealistic (Shepherd, Patzelt, & Wolfe, 2011) and is therefore normally connected to a termination of such effort, such as a project or a (new) venture (Moenkemeyer, Hoegl, & Weiss, 2012; Shepherd, 2003; Shepherd & Cardon, 2009). In contrast, we define setbacks as deviations between actual and expected/desired results that can, but not necessarily, lead to failure (Jenkins, Wiklund, & Brundin, 2014; Rauter et al., 2018). In this chapter, when discussing setbacks, we always refer to those that both involve and do not involve failure. Therefore, the effective response of management and employees to experiences of setbacks in organizations is crucial for organizational and individual performance as well as individual well-being. In this respect, many scholars even view setbacks as the proverbial impetus for learning (Cannon & Edmondson, 2005; Sitkin, 1992; Wei, Chen, Zhang, & Gong, 2019). However, research on avoiding setbacks has traditionally dominated organizational research, and scholars have only begun to understand the processes precipitated by setbacks in the workplace. Motivated by this knowledge gap as well as the significance of setbacks, in the field of management, we have witnessed a growing interest in the topic of setbacks in the workplace in the past two decades. This research examined the processes triggered by the experience of setbacks from different perspectives, mainly relating to recovery from and coping with work-related setbacks (e.g., Fritz, Sonnentag, Spector, & McInroe, 2010; Singh, Corner, & Pavlovich, 2007), the individual and collective attributes that qualify people and teams to bounce back from workplace setbacks (e.g., Chapman et al., 2018; Hartmann, Weiss, Newman, & Hoegl, 2020; Linnenluecke, 2017), and the professional learning triggered by such experiences (e.g., Dahlin, Chuang, & Roulet, 2018; He et al., 2018; Välikangas, Hoegl, & Gibbert, 2009).

Despite the significant advances of each of these three important perspectives in the past two decades, which have evolved to research on the consequences of setbacks in the workplace, that is, recovery, resilience, and learning, little interconnection has been found among them. In this regard, setback recovery can be conceptualized as “the process of reducing or eliminating physical and psychological strain symptoms that have been caused by job demands and stressful events at work” (Sonnentag & Fritz, 2015, p. S72), such as setbacks. Resilience can be defined as positive adaptation following a significantly adverse experience (Sutcliffe & Vogus, 2003), and learning from setbacks can be defined as the extent to which a person or team “reflects upon the problems and errors it experiences, interprets and makes sense of why they occurred […] to produce improved outcomes” (Carmeli, Tishler, & Edmondson, 2012, p. 33). These three perspectives have improved our understanding of the effective use of personal or collective resources to overcome setback experiences and organizational strategies for supporting employees during these difficult times.

Each perspective covers a distinct aspect of the process following the experience of workplace setbacks. Despite their uniqueness, these aspects are not independent of each other, showing several important interconnections and sharing some commonalities (with important differences as well) regarding the factors that facilitate positive outcomes in each perspective. Specifically, the perspective on setback recovery focuses on reactions displayed by individuals or teams to cope with the setback, specifically initial responses during or after the experience (Sonnentag & Fritz, 2015). The resilience perspective tends to take a broader view that particularly refers to such experiences and situations in which these initial reactions did not prevent the occurrence of significant adversity. It focuses on how individuals and teams adapt to substantial difficulty, which is a necessary definitional component of resilience (Hartmann et al., 2020), and bounce back toward or even beyond pre-setback levels of performance and well-being and seeks to identify which characteristics of a person, the situation, or the environment help in this respect. Thus, depending on the extent of the success of initial reactions to cope with and recover from setbacks, there might be more or less (or even no) need for resilience. Moreover, the way in which individuals or teams try to cope with setbacks is likely to influence their ability to recover and successfully adapt to such adversity (Todt, Weiss, & Hoegl, 2018). Finally, the perspective of learning from setbacks focuses on what focal entities can take away from the experience, that is, new knowledge they can apply in the future (Dahlin et al., 2018). These lessons might be relevant to how one can better react and adapt to such setbacks, but they might also be related to learning how to avoid certain underlying factors to these setbacks in the future. Important in this regard is that individuals and teams can learn from setbacks irrespective of their aftermath. This means that even if employees fail to fully recover from an experienced setback and might therefore be less motivated at their job, among others, they still might have learned how to avoid such situations in the future or might have gained other knowledge that they can use in their future careers. However, the ease and extent of such learning may still depend on the outcome of the focal entity’s success in recovering from and adapting to the setback, at least since a positive outcome in this regard might provide a better emotional and motivational basis for learning effects (Rauter et al., 2018; Wilhelm, Richter, & Semrau, 2019). Moreover, the approach of the affected organizations in coping with the experienced setback might also affect their likelihood to learn from it, for instance, whether their coping reactions are task-oriented or avoidance-oriented (Connor-Smith & Flachsbart, 2007). This assumed interplay between the three key perspectives in the process following setbacks is illustrated in Fig. 0.1.

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Fig. 0.1.

The Interplay Between Coping, Resilience, and Learning from Failure.

Hence, the insights gained in each of these perspectives on the consequences of setbacks may therefore inform each other, and a comprehensive and integrative view of setback-induced recovery and learning processes would allow for leveraging substantial synergies. It is therefore vital to connect and integrate these three perspectives. As such, this integration not only refers to the mutual consideration of theoretical and empirical insights gained from the three perspectives. It is also related to the application of these perspectives and the insights obtained from each of them to other subjects of analysis, given that each perspective tends to be predominantly applied to specific literature streams even though they are actually domain-general. For example, learning from setbacks is clearly not only relevant in domains such as entrepreneurship, innovation, or medicine but also found only cursory application outside these fields.

This was why our idea was born six years ago: to ignite an active conversation among scholars whose work revolves around concepts of recovery, resilience, and learning from setbacks that would shed light on how scholarly efforts can be expanded and extended by linking these processes and capacities. Our first attempt to facilitate the integration of these three perspectives on the consequences of setbacks was the organization of a professional development workshop at the Academy of Management Annual Meeting in Vancouver in 2015. This interactive and thought-provoking seminar brought together quite a large crowd of scholars of the three perspectives from diverse methodological backgrounds and research domains to bridge boundaries among them and was a starting point for initial collaborations and conversations spanning the three perspectives. To uphold and further spur the momentum created by this workshop, we decided to facilitate the development of an integrated foundation for cumulative theory development and empirical research on recovering, bouncing back, and learning from setbacks in organizations through an integrative and comprehensive publication – this edited book.

Specifically, this book aims to achieve several objectives. First, it will provide a thorough definition and classification of workplace setbacks which would help resolve the confusion regarding its conceptualization to guide future research on failure experiences. Moreover, it features experts in the fields of recovery, resilience, and learning, presenting leading-edge research and new developments in their fields to increase readers’ understanding of how to handle setbacks and support employees during and after such experiences. This will provide an interdisciplinary overview of the work and presents different research streams in the literature regarding the consequences of workplace setbacks. Furthermore, this book offers an integration of research on key perspectives (i.e., recovery, resilience, and learning from setbacks) in the field of work life after setbacks and aims to stimulate mutual learning experiences among disciplines and bridge gaps among scholars from different research domains. It offers a broader perspective of setbacks at work, from which both detailed suggestions for future research and practical guidance for dealing with failures are derived. In addition, with this book we hope to further enhance awareness of the topic of setbacks in organizations and develop a fertile discourse to advance research and theory about the underlying mechanisms and implications of work life after setbacks. As such, this book intends to cater to a broad spectrum of scholars and students in different fields, including organizational behavior, innovation management, human resources management, entrepreneurship, change management, industrial and organizational psychology, sports, engineering, and general management.