Repositioning Organizational Failure Through Active Acceptance
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Organization theory paper on how organizations recast failure as success; the object is organizational behavior, not research.
It studies how organizations reinterpret failure, not how research is conducted or evaluated.
Organization theory on reframing organizational failure as success; not research failure or research systems.
Abstract
This paper considers the way organizations respond to failure by actively repositioning the failed outcome as success. When an organization fails to meet planned goals, they do not necessarily learn from the experience, automatically terminate the plan, or persist with the failing course of action. Instead, another response is to shift original aspirations by recasting what was achieved, acting as if the ensuing failure is positive, despite indicators suggesting otherwise. As a mode of organizational interpretation, this repositioning reformats the criteria for what is success in order to move forward, enabling organizations to continue failed outcomes and their tasks that are well past their use-by date. After detailing this adjustment, we model an active-acceptance protocol on failure, discussing whether organizational effectiveness is predictable from how firms respond to failure in this way. The paper fills a gap in dialogue specific to failing by opening an alternative path to understand how organizations frame failure differently.
Stored with the screening record, where it is evidence for the labels above.
The record
- Venue
- Organization Theory
- Topic
- Management and Organizational Studies
- Field
- Business, Management and Accounting
- Canadian institutions
- Brock University
- Funders
- —
- Keywords
- Outcome (game theory)Action (physics)Plan (archaeology)Frame (networking)Order (exchange)Public relationsBusinessProcess managementInterpretation (philosophy)Knowledge managementPsychologyOperations managementPolitical scienceComputer scienceEconomicsFinanceMicroeconomics
- Has abstract in OpenAlex
- yes