Abstract
Employee learning from failures is key to effective employee functioning and long-term sustainable development. Although failure is an essential part of the learning process, it is less certain of why individuals would learn from failures and the benefits associated with it. Thus, it is significant to explore the cause and the consequence of learning from failures. Drawing upon self-determination theory, we explore the antecedent, consequence, and boundary condition of employee learning from failures. Random full-time employees in China were recruited to participate in the two-wave survey study via an online survey platform. Empirical results of 381 employees indicate that employee intrinsic motivation is positively related to employee learning from failures, which in turn facilitates employee self-development. Moreover, we found that benevolent leadership, a leadership style that is prevalent in the Chinese work context, plays an important moderating role in affecting the saliency of the indirect effect. Specifically, the indirect effect is more salient when benevolent leadership is higher. We test the hypotheses in SPSS using linear regressions and the PROCESS macro. Our study provides important implications for both theory and practice. Limitations and future research directions are also discussed.
Highlights
On June 13, 2019, Lee Chong Wei, the formerly number-one-ranked and renowned Malaysian badminton player, tearfully announced his retirement, thereby ending his stellar 19-year playing career
In this study, we focus on employee learning from failures, and explore how intrinsic motivation can stimulate learning from failures, which in turn, enhance self-development through the lens of self-determination theory (SDT)
While we examined the mediating role of employee learning from failures between intrinsic motivation and self-development, it is worthwhile for future research to explore other mechanisms linking these two variables
Summary
On June 13, 2019, Lee Chong Wei, the formerly number-one-ranked and renowned Malaysian badminton player, tearfully announced his retirement, thereby ending his stellar 19-year playing career. Despite the fact that Lee Chong Wei has accumulated countless glories in international competitions, he has failed in many important matches. Since failures are prevalent in everyday work and the benefits of failures could be leveraged by making good use of them, learning from failures is of great importance to employee development. Learning from failures can enhance problem solving (Tucker and Edmondson, 2003) and future decision-making quality (Chuang and Baum, 2003), and can reduce the likelihood of subsequent failures (Ingram and Baum, 1997; Kim et al, 2009) and enhance innovative performance (Homsma et al, 2009). Learning from failures improves performances at the individual- (e.g., Diwas et al, 2013), team- (e.g., Cannon and Edmondson, 2001), and organization-level (e.g., Zollo, 2009)
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