Individuals’ thinking, feeling, and acting at work are directly affected by the internal firm context they face (Brief and Weiss 2002). Bereavement scholars have given numerous examples of firms that enable social support by creating rituals and support groups designed to help mourning employees manage their grief (Archer and Freeman 1999). Through these rituals and support groups, firms provide their employees the chance to meet other people who have also experienced a loss. Through interactions with those people who have had similar grief, the employees can mimic coping behaviors and improve their own coping self-efficacy.
With the goal of helping individuals regulate their emotions, support groups are used in numerous contexts, especially in the case of losing a family member. More than 50% of all US hospice providers provide support groups to aid people manage their grief after losing a loved one (Foliart et al. 2001). According to Balk et al. (1993: 432), typical goals of support groups are as follows:The goal of the social support group meetings was to facilitate coping with grief and to assist in resolving the difficulties associated with mourning through education regarding adaptive tasks and coping skills pertinent to life crises and through opening channels of communication between groups.
Self-help groups , also called peer or mutual support groups, are the type of social support group that is most frequently used due to their low cost and because participants view such groups as providing high-safety environments (Caserta and Lund 1996). In practice, self-help groups are generally headed by a peer who has previously experienced a substantial loss and coped with it successfully. In the self-help context, leaders are not therapists or counselors but instead organize and facilitate the processes within the self-help support group (Caserta and Lund 1996). For instance, self-help support groups provide members emotional support and a positive environment that encourages information sharing. As a consequence, these groups enable their members to overcome grief more effectively (see Hopmeyer and Werk 1994). Thus, support groups are one example of a social support mechanism firms can use to help failed employees enhance their coping capabilities and (re)build the confidence required to take on future tasks (Caserta and Lund 1993).
Organizations generally have support groups to help participating employees deal with issues from outside the workplace that influence performance in their job (e.g., divorce, death of a loved family member) (Kahnweiler and Riordan 1998). Sometimes, organizations also provide support groups to help members cope with traumatic events that occur inside the organizational boundaries, such as large-scale corporate changes and downsizing (Esty 1987). Organizational members can further obtain social support from informal relationships they form with colleagues (Riordan and Griffeth 1995). In their study of 816 medical care providers in the Netherlands, Peeters and Le Blanc (2001) found that providers who obtained social support from the coworker could better cope with the emotional challenges of their work without developing insensitivity, indifference, or detachment from the patients’ difficult situations; that is, they did not have to rely on depersonalization. Thus, whereas coping self-efficacy represents individuals’ beliefs in their ability to cope , organizational social-exchange mechanisms can offer opportunities for employees to support one another and, as such, are important for improving their coping self-efficacy. In other words, social support can be a facilitator: “supporters model coping attitudes and skills, provide incentives for engagement in beneficial activities, and motivate others by showing that difficulties are surmountable by perseverant effort” (Benight and Bandura 2004: 1134). As a facilitator, social support can improve individuals’ self-efficacy. In their review of mediation studies across a broad range of situations and samples, Benight and Bandura (2004) established that social support is advantageous only when it enhances individuals’ perceived self-efficacy for handling environmental demands. If social support facilitates employees’ development of self-efficacy for overcoming grief caused by the failure of an entrepreneurial project, such support is also likely to help members learn from this failure and stay motivated on later projects.
Organizations also create and use rituals to enable organizational members to offer each other social support. Rituals are “standardized, detailed sets of techniques and behaviors that the culture prescribes to manage anxieties and express common identities ” (Trice and Beyer 1993: 80). Advantages derived from funeral rituals, for instance, can go beyond the death of a close family member or friend and be applied to losing something important in the organizational context. After investigating 11 parties, picnics, and dinners taking place in six dying organizations, Harris and Sutton (1986) theorized on parting ceremonies for (former) employees following firm death. They contended that the purpose of parting ceremonies is to offer emotional support for workers and help them learn from their experiences . When firms die, (former) employees tend to mourn over the loss, but they are also likely to benefit from the emotional support offered through parting ceremonies’ rituals. These rituals are particularly beneficial as they improve people’s coping self-efficacy.
Organizations could utilize a similar process for the emotional challenges associated with entrepreneurial project failures . That is, they could provide some type of funeral or parting ritual when a project fails. In fact, many organizations have already developed rituals to help their members deal with failure (see McCune 1997). For instance, Ore-Ida, a subsidiary of H. J. Heinz, shot off a celebratory cannon whenever a project failure occurred (Peters and Waterman 1982). Similarly, Eli Lilly hosted “perfect failure ” parties to honor outstanding scientific achievements that ultimately were associated with the failure of a project (Burton 2004: 1). Shooting off cannons or performing other rituals that signify a project’s death can effectively improve learning from failure by helping build employees’ coping self-efficacy. Rituals do this by offering a space for social support with regard to the grief-recovery process. When employees know that they will always have social support (because it is a ritual), their confidence in their ability to cope with grief over entrepreneurial project failure will increase.
Social support often results in enhanced well-being, and firms are in the position to create spaces for compassion being received and given (Kanov et al. 2004). This compassion can include empathetic listening to other organizational members’ problems (Frost 2003), sympathetic emotions (Carlo et al. 1999), and executing large-scale reactions to unanticipated traumatic events (Dutton et al. 2006). Mostly seen as an important and positive force in firms (Kanov et al. 2004), scholars have explored compassion at numerous levels of analysis; these levels include individuals’ compassion for others (Nussbaum 1996), compassion as an interpersonal, people-connecting process (Kanov et al. 2004), and the ways people unite to deliver an organized compassionate organizational response (e.g., compassion organizing (Dutton et al. 2006) and compassion venturing (Shepherd and Williams 2014; Williams and Shepherd 2016)). Compassion is the manifestation of the instinctive human need to respond to others’ suffering in order to ease that suffering . In this context, suffering includes some form of loss or pain that jeopardizes individuals’ sense of meaning about their existence (Dutton et al. 2006). Here, compassion represents people’s reaction when their self-meaning or psychological health is threatened. Additionally, compassion entails responses to others’ suffering , so it is not emotion-based but also involves action (Dutton et al. 2006).
Self-Compassion, Negative Emotions, and Learning from Project Failure
Just like other -directed compassion entails recognizing, feeling , and taking action in response to another individual’s suffering (Dutton et al. 2006), self-compassion captures being aware that one is personally experiencing feelings of loss, determining the cause of that feeling (i.e., project failure in this case), and responding by taking action to do something about it (Shepherd and Cardon 2009). Employees who are self-compassionate are moved by their own negative emotions over project failure, are mindful of their discomfort, and want to ease this suffering by healing them
selves instead of avoiding or detaching from the negative emotions’ origin (Neff 2003a; Wispe 1991). Unlike other-directed compassion , the relational process of self-compassion (Kanov et al. 2004) happens through the relationships people have with themselves.
We propose that there are three aspects of self-compassion—self-kindness , common humanity, and mindfulness —and we connect them to (1) the strength of individuals’ negative emotional responses to project failures and (2) the altering of the association between experiences of negative emotions and people’s learning related to the failure event. We make several assumptions with this approach. First, we argue—and empirical evidence shows (Neff 2003b; Shapiro et al. 2005)—that people can learn self-compassion over time. Further, self-compassion is a required (yet insufficient) condition for people to achieve learning outcomes from project failure. Finally, when individuals are self-compassionate, they have less anxiety about negative events and, as a consequence, can better sustain their psychological health (Neff and Davidson 2016).
In this section, we focus on how self-regulation can help individuals handle or counteract threats stemming from project failure and improve their learning from these events. In our theorizing, we suggest that people who are caring toward themselves when evaluating project failure (high levels of self-kindness ) view project failure objectively in relation to other individuals (high common humanity ), maintain an emotional balance (high mindfulness ), have fewer negative emotions from project failure, and are more capable of using the failure as a chance for learning . In the following, we discuss these three aspects of self-compassion that aid employees in self-regulating their negative emotions from project failure in a manner that facilitates learning . We do not provide an exhaustive summary of mechanisms that enhance self-kindness , common humanity , and mindfulness ; rather, we simply believe that these mechanisms exist and play a crucial role in explaining variance in people’s negative emotional responses to project failure and the extent to which they learn from the experience (based on Shepherd and Cardon 2009).
Self-Kindness, Negative Emotions, and Learning from Project Failure
Self-kindness refers to being kind to and understanding of oneself instead of extending harsh judgment and self-criticism (Neff 2003a : 89) after project failure. Individuals demonstrate self-kindness—at least partly —when they (1) attempt to understand and have patience with personal traits they do not like, (2) are caring to themselves when suffering from project failure, (3) provide themselves with the tenderness required to handle the difficult aspects of project failure, (4) tolerate their own imperfections and shortcomings potentially having contributed to project failure, and (5) try to be loving toward themselves when they feel negative emotions (Neff 2003b) from project failure.
Self-kindness is unlikely to lessen the emotional significance of the failed entrepreneurial project for those involved; yet, it does help deter individuals from deeming themselves “bad” because of the failure. People who are highly self-kind and go through project failure are less likely to callously be critical of themselves for not being able to achieve optimal project standards (Neff 2003a), which safeguards them against anxiety when they reflect on their weaknesses (Neff et al. 2007). In addition to lower anxiety, self-kindness can keep people from engaging in ruminations, which—as we discussed earlier—can cause increased negative emotions (Nolen-Hoeksema 1991). Thus, having the ability to separate the project failure event from assessments of the self , an employee with high self-kindness can diminish his or her negative emotional response to the failure of a project.
Self-kindness depends on discriminating wisdom, which “clearly evaluates the positive or negative quality of actions but does so with a compassionate understanding of the complex, dynamic situational factors that impact these actions , so that particular performances are not taken as indicators of self-worth” (Neff et al. 2005: 264). We are not suggesting that people overlook such failings or accept them without resistance. Rather, self-kindness facilitates the elimination of failure-related learning obstacles. Only when individuals judge themselves harshly, the ego’s protective mechanisms kick in. While these mechanisms conceal inadequacies from individuals’ self-awareness to maintain self-esteem (Neff 2003a), they ultimately diminish how much people learn. Self-kindness offers an emotional safety net that enables higher self-awareness by providing an objectively more accurate perception of the project’s failure (Shepherd and Cardon 2009). In other words, self-kindness stops people from allowing their subjective reactions to go too far (Neff 2003a), possibly initiating ruminations (Nolen-Hoeksema 1991), and/or worsening negative emotions (Nolen-Hoeksema 1991). This higher level of negative emotions generally obstructs learning (Nolen-Hoeksema 1991; Shepherd 2003) because when individuals concentrate on their negative emotions, they have less capacity to attend to and process information about their failure experience . Furthermore, employees’ awareness of their own flaws and mistakes is a crucial input for learning ; self-kindness can improve this self-awareness. Thus, having the ability to evaluate entrepreneurial project failure separate from self-worth assessments, those with self-compassion face fewer barriers in their learning process.
Common Humanity and Learning from Project Failure
Common humanity refers to viewing one’s experiences as part of the greater human experience instead of viewing them as separate and isolated (Neff 2003a: 85). That is, employees with common humanity see their failure experiences in relation to the common human experience in their firm, recognizing that failures are an inevitable element of innovation and that everyone, including themselves, deserves compassion (Shepherd and Cardon 2009). This perspective enables individuals to stay connected to other organizational members. Based on these connections with others in the organizations, the employees can forgive themselves for any of their flaws contributing to project failure.
It is doubtful that mechanisms stressing commonality will lessen the importance of any one entrepreneurial project among employees; rather, when a project fails, they help individuals put their resulting feelings into context. In other words, acknowledging that they share their feelings of grief over project failure with other individuals within the firm helps them be less self-critical (Rubin 1975) and facilitates forgiving themselves for prior shortcomings (Neff 2003a). Thus, these individuals are less likely to perceive project failure as threatening their self-esteem. With decreasing common humanity, on the other hand, employees are more likely to view project failure as threatening since they tend to feel isolated and less related to others, reducing personal well-being. Moreover, individuals perceive the resulting threatening situations negatively, leading to higher anxiety and stress (e.g., Leary et al. 2001).
Higher levels of common humanity will also influence people’s ability to learn from entrepreneurial project failure. More specifically, when employees realize that all organizational members experienced the negative emotions caused by the failure, they are more likely to participate in the necessary impartial diagnosis of the failure’s cause and provide possible accounts for the failure (Shepherd and Cardon 2009). By blaming themselves less, organizational members will externalize blame attributions less as a means to defend their ego. Externalizing sources of blame is frequently an effective way to protect one’s self-esteem (e.g., Brockner and Guare 1983). However, externalizing blame offers few opportunities for learning because there is not much to learn because the individual feels that the failure was due to factors completely outside his or her control (e.g., Diener and Dweck 1980). In this case, common humanity may actually result in a collective desire to determine who or what should be blamed for the failure. Indeed, an employee may ascribe entrepreneurial project failure to numerous causes (e.g., the organizational management or the economic context). Yet, real learning from failure—namely, attempting to understand what went awry and how to avoid similar issues in subsequent projects—requires an impartial and honest evaluation of the failure’s primary causes. Leary et al. (2007) called such
evaluations impartial attributions as opposed to self-attributions. According to Neff (2003a), self-compassion effectively safeguards employees’ personal well-being from negative events irrespective of them causing the event. Further, Leary and colleagues (2007) showed that self-compassionate individuals put forth higher effort to be kind to themselves when they attributed negative events to themselves. In this study, self-compassion was beneficial no matter what the attribution of blame.
Organizational members partly demonstrate common humanity when they try to remind themselves that most people have feelings of inadequacy following entrepreneurial project failure, attempt to see their mistakes as part of the human condition in an organizational environment, remind themselves that there are many employees in their own and other organizations who feel dejected in the case of project failure, and remember that everyone goes through challenging situations (adapted from Neff 2003b). Without connecting to others in this way, people can feel isolated, lessening informal learning and information access as well as decreasing their ability to initiate action (Martinko and Gardner 1982). When employees have higher common humanity, they do not stay connected to the failure of the entrepreneurial project because they have forgiven themselves for any mistakes they contributed to the failure and have also forgiven other project team members who may have been blamed for the failure (Shepherd and Cardon 2009). In turn, this forgiveness deactivates the defensive mechanisms that obstruct learning .
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