The Phenomenon of Failure Sharing

Individuals in organizations are often confronted with failure. Failure can be costly for organizations and may stigmatize individual careers and organizations reputations. Failure can, however, be a valuable opportunity that allows individuals and organizations to learn from it to improve performance. Current learning from failure literature implicitly assumes that failure is shared at work. However, no empirical study has investigated the behavior of sharing failure. Therefore, this study explores sharing failure and failure experience in the workplace by asking three major research questions: RQ1: Why do individuals share, or not share, failure with others? RQ2: When they do share failure, why did individuals choose the respective target to share failure with? RQ3: What do individuals learn from sharing failure? This study found that two factors motivate individuals to share their failures with others: help seeking and help giving. On the other hand, several other factors deter individuals from sharing their failures with others: fear of repercussions, managing impressions, and protecting others. Once an individual decides to share their failure and failure experiences with others, the individual is selective about whom they will share their failure with. Several attributes of the potential target(s) influence this choice: perceived ability of the target, desired help, and proximity. This study found that post sharing failure with others, sharers learned more about their failure and their failure sharing behavior and/or gained psychological benefits. The three research questions are independent, but findings are interdependent, such that each part is required for learning from sharing failure. Taken together, these findings contribute to the learning from failure and knowledge sharing literature to give researchers and practitioners a deeper understanding of the dynamics of sharing failure and failure experiences. Also, these findings are relevant and important to individuals as well as organizations as they can modify their failure sharing behaviors with the goal of learning from failures.