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"Moving on or Moving Forward from Project Failure: Rapid Termination, Creeping Death, and Learning"

2013; Academy of Management; Volume: 2013; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5465/ambpp.2013.10698abstract

2376-7197

Dean A. Shepherd, Holger Patzelt, Trenton A. Williams,

Innovation and Knowledge Management

Although there is widespread acknowledgement of the importance of learning from failure in R&D project settings, most organizational members find doing so to be quite difficult. Despite the opportunity to learn from failure, organizational members face a number of obstacles to doing so. In this inductive case study we explore the process by which a project is terminated (delayed and rapid termination) and how that impacts team members’ emotions, learning from failure, and the interaction of the two. We obtained uncommon access to project team members of a large multinational technology firm based in Europe and conducted a multiple-case study exploring 8 project teams that experienced a failure and either a rapid or delayed termination of that project. We found that the failure event ended learning rather than triggered it, that an inability to move forward generated greater negative emotion than the failure itself (influencing learning), and that a modified real options approach in determining how to terminate a failing project could balance economical, knowledge growth, and other desired organizational outcomes. Although scholars have acknowledged that issues related to the timing, emotions, and learning surrounding project failure are likely to be important, this study offers a number of new insights in this area. While real options reasoning advocates for (1) rapid termination of failing projects, (2) rapid redeployment of human resources, and (3) learning from project failures in managing the uncertainty of R&D, based on our findings, we propose that an organization can have two but not all three of these attributes.