Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Clark University conducted a new study that was published in the Strategic Management Journal, funded by the Center for Organizational Learning, Innovation and Knowledge at the Tepper School.
The research aimed to assess the relationship between the experience of individuals with failures and their learning outcomes.
307 California-based cardiothoracic surgeons who performed isolated coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgeries in 133 hospitals between 2003 and 2018 were selected for collecting data. Here failures were defined as patient deaths from the surgeries and individual learning was measured in terms of surgeons’ surgery performance after such experiences.
Research findings confirmed there is an inverted-U-shaped relationship between individual learning and individuals’ own accumulated failures. It suggested surgeons’ performance increased as a function of their accumulated failures to a certain point and then decreased. Also, this certain point came later in case of the surgeons who were assumed to have higher perceived abilities to learn or with certified expertise, elite training and have specialized in patient care.
The result also suggested that gathering one’s failures can create a force that may increase their opportunity to learn but may decrease their motivation so the learning depends on the dominating force.
Coauthore of the study, Jisoo Park added “Our findings suggest that not all experiences necessarily lead to learning, and that repeated failures can have both beneficial and harmful impacts on individuals’ learning processes, Therefore, both impacts must be considered simultaneously to understand and improve individuals’ performance.”
Limitations:
As only cardiac surgeons were studied, for whom failure means patient deaths. This triggers a greater amount of negative emotions and attribution biases for them than the individuals in organizations face. Also, it involves situations where repeated failures are uncontrollable and it might have made the individuals attribute their failures as external causes. According to the author the study can be helpful for organizational design in terms of hiring and training employees. For example, hiring resilient employees who can face repeated failures to improve the Organizational performance.
References +
- https://neurosciencenews.com/failure-learning-psychology-26084
- https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/smj.3609
