Journal of Business Venturing 24 (2009) 588–600

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Journal of Business Venturing

Project failure from corporate entrepreneurship: Managing the grief process☆

Dean A. Shepherd⁎, Jeffrey G. Covin 1, Donald F. Kuratko 2

Kelley School of Business, Indiana University, 1309 East Tenth Street, Bloomington, IN 47405-1701, United States

a r t i c l e i n f o

☆ This paper was accepted for publication before D⁎ Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 812 856 5220.

E-mail addresses: shepherd@indiana.edu (D.A. She1 Tel.: +1 812 855 2715.2 Tel.: +1 812 855 1403.

0883-9026/$ – see front matter. Published by Elseviedoi:10.1016/j.jbusvent.2008.01.009

a b s t r a c t

Article history:Received 1 August 2006Revised 1 January 2008Accepted 1 January 2008

In this paper, we complement social cognitive theorywith psychological theories on grief in ourdiscussion of two approaches to grief management – grief regulation and grief normalization –

that hold promise for enabling corporate entrepreneurs to cope with negative emotionsinduced by project failure. We propose that to the extent that organizational members havehigh self-efficacy for recovering from grief over project failure, or this coping self-efficacy canbe built through the social support offered by the organizational environment, regulatingrather than eliminating, grief via normalization processes will explain superior learning andmotivational outcomes.

Published by Elsevier Inc.

Keywords:EmotionRegulationLearningCommitmentNormalization

1. Executive summary

Increasingly, organizations are committing to the position that corporate entrepreneurial activity is essential if they are tofirst survive and achieve competitive success in a world being driven by accelerating change. For success to be recorded usingcorporate entrepreneurship, those within the firm must be aware of it and encouraged and nurtured in their use of it. Whileanecdotal evidence suggests that firms are becomingmore diligent in developing programs aimed at promoting entrepreneurialactivity, the prospect of failure still looms large. The literature is replete with research on the importance of failure and thelearning that must take place once failure has occurred. However, the literature seldom recognizes the importance of grief inthe failure experience. Grief is a negative emotional response to the loss of something important triggering behavioral,psychological and physiological symptoms. Managing grief represents a particularly salient task in the context of corporateentrepreneurship practice because the commitment to a project essential for success also generates grief when it fails, projectfailure is a common occurrence, and organizational routines and rituals are likely to influence the grief recovery of thoseinvolved in the failed project.

In this paper, we complement social cognitive theory with psychological theories on grief and coping to propose whichapproaches to failure are more likely to enable individuals to learn from project failure andmaintain commitments for subsequententrepreneurial projects. From a theoretical standpoint, the role of failure experiences on the performance of subsequent projectsis uncertain. On the one hand, organizations that provide failure experiencesmay normalize failure – render failure less salient andarousing, that is, more ordinary – such that there is less emotional interference with learning from the failure experience. On theother hand, negative emotions have some positive implications for learning and by desensitizing organizational members' feelings

ean A. Shepherd became editor-in-chief of the Journal of Business Venturing.

pherd), covin@indiana.edu (J.G. Covin), dkuratko@indiana.edu (D.F. Kuratko).

r Inc.

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of grief over project failure, learning from the failure experience and commitment to other current and future projects may also bereduced. To the extent that organizational members have high self-efficacy for recovering from grief over project failure and/orthis coping self-efficacy can be built through the social support offered by the organizational environment, regulating (rather thaneliminating) negative emotions will likely provide better learning and motivational outcomes.

Our paper has several important implications. First, whether a regulation approach to grief management is superior or inferiorto a normalization approach (as a means to learn from project failure experiences and sustain commitment to future projects)depends on the firm's endowment of resources and/or the resources it can access. The key resource needed to build effectivenessin regulating the negative emotions generated by grief is coping self-efficacy. If a failed project's members, on average, possesshigh levels of this resource, then theywill be able to effectively regulate their negative emotions in manners that facilitate learningfrom the project and commitment to future entrepreneurial projects. In the absence of high levels of coping self-efficacy among afailed project's team members, a normalization approach to grief management in which failure is desensitized may yield superioroutcomes.

Second, it is not so much the specific grief management techniques employed but, rather, the meaning and value ascribed toproject failure within an organization that is the major point of differentiation between alternative grief management approaches.The meaning and value ascribed to project failure will reflect, in part, an organization's culture. As such, the cultural context inwhich project failure occurs may be a significant determinant of how grief is managed.

Third, because “portfolio mindsets” can enable individuals to redefine their concepts of failure in more psychologically andorganizationally productive ways, firms that embrace a portfolio approach to the pursuit of entrepreneurial projects may mostreadily develop grief regulation among their project members. Under a portfolio mindset, individuals can better appreciate thevaluable linkages that exist between projects. This is important because social support mechanisms aimed at helping individualsdeal with grief are generally assumed to be most successful when they enable the bereft to view their circumstances in a morepositive light.

Finally, the utilization of dedicated corporate innovation units may be conducive to the emergence of grief regulation amongindividuals involved in entrepreneurial projects. The inevitability of entrepreneurial project failure in organizational unitsdedicated to innovation encourages the adoption of social support mechanisms as means for developing failure-related copingskills. The need in dedicated corporate innovation units for social support mechanisms that enable corporate entrepreneurs tocope with failure-related grief will likely ensure their use and hone their effectiveness, thereby building individuals' coping self-efficacy.

2. Introduction

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Not many people are willing to give failure a second opportunity. They fail once and it is all over. The bitter pill of failure isoften more than most people can handle. If you are willing to accept failure and learn from it, if you are willing to considerfailure as a blessing in disguise and bounce back, you have got the essentials of harnessing one of the most powerfusuccess forces. — Joseph Sugarman

Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm. — Winston Churchill

The pursuit of high-variance entrepreneurial opportunities is a well-recognized path to the realization of firm growth andstrategic renewal (e.g., Hitt et al., 2002; McGrath and MacMillan, 2000). For the established firm, corporate entrepreneurship asexpressed through entrepreneurial projects represents the potential “engine of progress” through which new products can becreated, new markets can be entered, new technologies can be explored, and new businesses can be built (Zahra et al., 1999)However, entrepreneurial projects are essentially experiments with unknowable outcomes (McGrath, 1999). As such, occasionaor even frequent entrepreneurial project failure is inevitable among firms that practice corporate entrepreneurship (Burgelmanand Valikangas, 2005). Project failure occurs when a project's activities cease due to unsatisfactory or insufficient progress. Morespecifically, entrepreneurial project failure is the termination of a project due to the realization of unacceptably low performanceas operationally defined by the project's key resource providers (as opposed to projects terminated for other strategic reasons). Iis estimated that 35 to 45% of all new products fail (Boulding and Morgan, 1997). In a study of 95 venturing units in corporationsheadquartered in eight countries around the world, Campbell et al. (2003) reported no instances of success among firms pursuing“new legs” ventures, or internal corporate ventures founded as major growth initiatives in novel (to the initiating firm) product-market domains.

The successful pursuit of entrepreneurial opportunities is the common goal of corporate entrepreneurship initiatives. Howeverfailure in the exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities is not a wholly negative project outcome because within some failureslie the seeds of subsequent project success. This failure-to-success sequence has been observed in cases of, for example, newproduct development (Maidique and Zirger, 1985), internal corporate venturing (McGrath, 1995), and joint venturing (Peng andShenkar, 2002). Still, subsequent success is not an inevitable consequence of prior project failure. For success to occur, theorganization must have learned from its prior mistakes — entrepreneurial failures represent potential opportunities for learning(Green et al., 2003). Learning new knowledge makes future entrepreneurial initiatives more likely (Hayek, 1945) and suchinitiatives constitute possible bases for firm growth and renewal (McGrath et al., 1996). Therefore, individuals can helporganizations improve their innovation “hit rate” over time by learning from failure and emotionally committing to subsequenprojects.

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The corporate entrepreneurship context – that is, a context defined by the pursuit of entrepreneurial projects withinestablished firms – is a particularly meaningful setting in which to explore issues of entrepreneurial failure for two primaryreasons. First, the stock of resources allocated to failed entrepreneurial initiatives – most critically, human resources – oftenremain present within corporations after those initiatives fail or otherwise become defunct. As such, the opportunity to learn fromfailure will often exist to a greater extent than in independent start-ups that fail. In the latter setting, learning opportunities areoften lost when the parties involved are disbanded (Rerup, 2005). Second, the challenge of copingwith grief, learning from failure,and being committed to future entrepreneurial projects after the experience of failed initiatives is particularly complicated in thecorporate setting because entrepreneurial projects represent “newstreams” that must co-exist in some capacity with operations inthe “mainstream” (Kanter, 1989). Thus, an important if not unique challenge of corporate entrepreneurship is the need to operateambidextrously (Tushman and O'Reilly, 1996), balancing the novel with the familiar. Understanding how to effectively pursueexploratory learning in the context of larger organizational settings that emphasize exploitation is a critical managementchallenge (March, 1991).

Unfortunately, there are powerful forces thatmitigate against the possibility that organizational memberswill learn from failedentrepreneurial initiatives. Grief is a negative emotional reaction to the loss of something important (Archer, 1999), such as theloss of a loved one (Stroebe and Schut, 2005), the loss of a leg from amputation (Wilson, 1977), divorce (Roach and Kitson, 1989)and the loss of a business (Shepherd, 2003). Although the death of a project is obviously not the same as the death of a loved one,the negative emotional response to that loss (grief) is likely similar (see Archer, 1999). Grief can interfere with normal functioning(Znoj and Keller, 2002) and, in particular, with the processing of new information (Mathews et al., 1990). Nonetheless, grief canalso trigger a process of meaning reconstruction (Davis and Nolen-Hoeksema, 2001). Of particular importance, to the extent thatmembers are committed to a project, they are likely to feel grief when it fails. Managing grief represents a particularly salient taskin the context of corporate entrepreneurship practice because team members are often passionate about “their” projects (Royer,2003), project failure is a common occurrence (Burgelman and Valikangas, 2005), and organizational routines are likely toinfluence the way that people feel about project failure (Farson and Keyes, 2002).

There are two primary approaches to the management of failure. The first acknowledges the interference created by negativeemotions on task performance and manages failure by normalizing it, such that negative emotions are not induced by projectfailure. The second acknowledges the positive impact that grief has in signaling the importance of an event for learning purposes.This latter approach manages failure by regulating the negative emotions of grief. Grief regulation, then, refers to the process andcharacteristics involved in coping with heightened levels of negative emotions triggered by the loss of something important. Inthis paper, we complement the normalization approach by integrating social cognitive theory with psychological theories on lossand trauma to offer a social cognitive model of project failure. This model specifies the organizational conditions when regulating,rather than normalizing, grief generated by project failure is more likely to improve performance on subsequent projects throughlearning processes and maintaining commitment. In doing so, we make three primary contributions to the literature.

First, the innovation and corporate entrepreneurship literatures have long acknowledged the importance of members'commitment to project success (e.g., Amabile, 2000; Cooper and Kleinschmidt, 1994) and the importance of social exchangeamong project members for the sharing of information (Brown and Eisenhardt, 1995). However, these literatures have notadequately recognized that, just as positive emotions can emanate from project success, grief can emanate from project failure. Bycontrast, we focus on the under-explored phenomenon of grief in the context of project failure. Specifically, we explain why griefover project failure influences learning and commitment to subsequent projects and how improving organizational members'abilities to regulate grief can enhance these outcomes.

Second, research on learning from failure has focused on cognitive and attentive processes and has either implicitly ignoredemotions or explicitly prescribed mechanisms for excluding negative emotions from the learning process (e.g., Sitkin's, 1992intelligent failure approach). We complement this cognitive understanding by considering the role of grief in individual's learningfrom failure and how regulating, rather than eliminating, negative emotions influences the learning process. Furthermore,research to date has acknowledged the importance of maintaining self-efficacy for performing a task successfully in the face ofnegative performance feedback (e.g., Weick's, 1984 strategy of “small wins”). We complement this approach by investigating theeffect (and development) of a belief in one's ability to cope with failure. This notion of coping self-efficacy (Benight and Bandura,2003) is central to our explanation of the effect of grief on learning from failure.

Finally, previous research has investigated the relevance of the grief recovery process to learning from failure 1) outside of anorganizational context and 2) independent of the motivation to try again (e.g., Parkes and Weiss, 1983). By investigating projectfailure within organizations, this paper explicitly acknowledges the importance of context to the accumulation of knowledge andcommitment to future projects. Consistentwith the tenets of Situated Learning Theory (e.g., Brown and Duguid, 1991), context canbe critical to knowledge acquisition success and one's motivation to learn. Furthermore, in this paper we investigate theinterdependencies of ability and motivation to gain a deeper understanding of how different approaches to failure management –normalization and regulation – impact organizational members' learning from failure and commitment to subsequent projects.

3. Emotions and project outcomes

3.1. Commitment and project performance

Generally speaking, organizations engage in entrepreneurial projects in hopes of achieving or sustaining a high level of firmperformance (Lumpkin and Dess, 1996). The realization of high performance via corporate entrepreneurship is sought through

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projects that employ innovation for growth and strategic renewal purposes (Covin and Miles, 1999). The specific foci ofentrepreneurial projects are numerous and could include, for example, product innovation, market innovation, technologicalinnovation, business model innovation, and strategic innovation. Likewise, the factors which have been found to affectentrepreneurial project success are many and varied (for a review see Kuratko et al., 2005).

Quite often, the success of entrepreneurial projects depends on the commitment of management, the project leader, and therest of the project team to the innovation effort (Amabile, 2000; Song and Parry, 1997). Commitment towards innovation typicallystems from intrinsic motivation— “innovators like to innovate; being on the leading edge of a technology can be both scientificallysatisfying and ego gratifying…” (Green et al., 2003: 423). Importantly, innovations often begin with creative ideas (Amabile et al.,1996), and individuals and teams are typicallymost creative when they are passionate about what they are doing (Amabile, 2000).Therefore, commitment by team members to a project appears to enhance its potential performance.

Of course, despite considerable commitment by organizational members, projects can still fail.3 For example, new productsmay be targeted toward markets that prove too small to warrant their entrance, new technologies may not deliver the level ofperformance superiority initially anticipated, customer tastes may have shifted away from a new product's intended basis ofappeal, or competitors may have erected entry barriers more formidable than market data suggested (Lieberman andMontgomery, 1988). Regardless of the reasons behind a project's failure, those committed to the project will likely feel they havelost something important when the project fails. For example, theymay have lost their emotional bond to a product and/or an idea,lost part of their individual and collective identity, or lost personal relationships with other teammembers who are redeployed tovarious other initiatives upon a project's failure. Royer (2003) proposed that organizational members feel an attachment to theprojects in which they passionately believe and setbacks are felt as an emotional blow.

3.2. Emotional interference, learning from failure, and project performance

When something important is lost, people typically feel grief (Archer, 1999). For example, Albert Yu, the senior vice presidentof Intel, has commented on the emotions elicited through project failure. He also suggests that such failures are possibleopportunities to learn from experience:

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“The infamous Pentium flaw in 1994 was devastating, and we went through all the stages of grief — denial, anger,acceptance. It was incredibly painful to the company and to me, personally. But we managed to become better as a result.It marked a real transition. I'm a different person today. I've beefed up the way we validate our technology before it getsout the door. We went from having a product-engineered orientation to a consumer orientation. We broke down barriersinside the company because we were all involved in an emergency” (Dillon, 1998).

Notably, Albert Yu's comments indicate that an emotion as strong as grief can and does occur as a result of project failure. It isnot hyperbole to associate grief with project failure. However, it should be acknowledged that not all project failures will generategrief. Rather, there are certain project circumstances and individual predispositions under which project failure is most likely toresult in a felt sense of grief. First, grief is greater over the loss of objects for which the individual has made sustained emotional“investments” (Jacobs et al., 2000). Therefore, consistent with the endowment effect (Loewenstein and Issacharoff, 1994),organizational members' grief is likely greater over the failure of projects that have been worked on for an extended period.Second, grief is often greater for sudden, unexpected losses (Kubitz et al., 1989). Therefore, projects that fail rapidly or areunexpectedly terminated by management are likely to cause organizational members to experience greater grief. Third, recent,multiple losses can result in an accumulation of grief (Nord, 1996). As such, a project failure that occurs after a series of recentproject failures will likely lead to higher levels of grief. Finally, themore importance attached by an individual to the object lost, thegreater the level of grief (Archer, 1999). For example, when the project forms part of an organizational member's identity, then itsfailure is likely to generate high levels of grief.

Significantly, although Albert Yu acknowledges that learning eventually took place after the project's failure, the griefimmediately generated by the failure likely interferedwith individuals' abilities to learn from the experience.4 Learning often takestime after a failure because it involves a process of grief recovery that manages, and eventually eliminates, the negative emotionalreaction from the loss of something important (Shepherd, 2003). Negative emotion(s) have been found to interfere withindividuals' allocation of attention to, and the processing of, information (Mogg et al., 1990), which in turn negatively impactslearning (Bower, 1992). For example, emotional events receive higher priority in processing information than do those that are

consider projects that are terminated for reasons other than poor performance are defunct projects, but they are not failures. For example, aneneurial project that is “on track” in the estimation of those responsible for overseeing entrepreneurial initiatives may, nonetheless, be terminated if thers believe that the organizational resources devoted to the project would be better allocated elsewhere. This might occur, for example, if a firm adoptsategic or technological priorities that redirect entrepreneurial efforts. Although there are innumerable specific intra- and extra-project drivers of projectance, and failure is defined relative to performance expectations, the locus of project failure – i.e., the place where failure occurs – is the project or theeneurial initiative. The effects of failure can be acutely felt by individual project team members as well as by non-members who are emotionally vested inject. As such, while the concept of project failure applies to the overall entrepreneurial initiative, the emotional effects of project failure are idiosyncraticiduals.ough learning can occur at the project team and organization level, our model is based on theories primarily developed for the individual level of. Accordingly, we focus on the individual level of analysis. Although groups can learn (Kogut and Zander, 1996), the challenge with exploring projectearning from project failure is that the team is often disbanded.

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neutral (Ellis et al., 1971) and priority on the emotions of failure may cause a premature termination of processing informationabout the possible causes of failure (Bower, 1992).

The interference of negative emotions on learning is likely compounded when there is considerable informational feedbackbecause situations that place greater demands on information processing have been found to cause individuals to bemore prone toemotional interference (Mathews et al., 1990). That is, negative emotional interference appears to be particularly detrimental toperformance for complex tasks (Huber, 1985), such as the task of learning from project failure. Indeed, activation theory proposesthat arousal, such as from negative emotions, likely provides performance advantages for simple tasks, but as the complexity ofthese tasks increase the performance benefits are eventually outweighed by the costs associated with emotional interference(Huber, 1985).

3.3. Managing failure by normalizing it: an intelligent failure approach

In the context where the consequences of failure are particularly high, breaking down a complex task into a series of moremodest ones provides individuals an opportunity to experience a number of small wins, which has the effect of motivatingconstructive action (Weick, 1984). These wins might help build self-efficacy at the task and, thereby, have a positive influence ontask performance for subsequent and more difficult versions of the task (Bandura, 1991). However, a possible limitation of this“small wins” approach is that given its “smallness”, individuals' attention might be low leading to reduced information search(Sitkin, 1992). An alternate approach is “intelligent failure”, which acknowledges the benefits to failure if “1) they [i.e., the projectsundertaken] result from thoughtfully planned actions, 2) have uncertain outcomes, 3) are of modest scale, 4) are executed andresponded to with alacrity, and 5) take place in domains that are familiar enough to permit effective learning” (Sitkin, 1992: 243).For alacrity to be displayed, individuals need to experience failure without a negative emotional response. This can be achieved byorganizations that normalize failure for their members.

Normalization refers to institutionalized processes by which the extra-ordinary (in this case, failure) is rendered moreordinary. For example, stimuli that are threatening, unusual, consequential, or personally meaningful may arouse deep feelings.The process of normalization renders the stimulus less salient and arousing, that is, more ordinary (Ashforth and Kreiner, 2002:217). In general, normalization occurs as a result of habituation or desensitization processes. Habituation refers to the processwhereby repeated exposure to the same stimulus results in progressively weaker reactions to the stimulus. This process can befacilitated by social processes and occurs collectively (Ashforth and Kreiner, 2002). Desensitization refers to a process involvingexposure to stimuli of increasing aversiveness which reduces the mismatch between expected and actual stimuli, thus reducingthe emotional response (St-Onge, 1995). That is, by being exposed to a series of failures of increasing magnitude the mismatchbetween expected and actual failure is small and, therefore, the “new” project failure generates less negative emotions thanwouldotherwise be the case without this prior exposure.

Normalization can also enhance an individual's persistence with what was originally considered an aversive task. For example,in discussing how he overcame the initial repugnance of handling corpses to persist at the task, a hospital orderly suggested that“after a while, I got used to it. Each time it got a little easier. It's just not that big a deal anymore” (Reed, 1989: 48). Normalization ofproject failure might result in persistence with innovation efforts; with project failure no longer generating grief, organizationalmembers are less likely to be discouraged to try again. Applying intelligent failure precepts to managing innovation, Farson andKeyes (2002: 4–5) introduced the notion of the “failure tolerant leader”. A failure tolerant leader is an executive who, “throughtheir words and actions, help people overcome their fear of failure, and, in the process, create a culture of intelligent risk takingthat leads to sustained innovation” (4). Fear of failure is reduced by normalizing failure. For example, a failure tolerant leader treats“steps in the innovation process – those that work and those that don't –with less evaluation and more interpretation. They don'tpraise or penalize; they analyze” (5). In much the same way “the best coaches take victory or defeat in stride. ‘I didn't getconsumed by losses’, said the legendary NFL coach Don Shula, ‘and I didn't get overwhelmed by successes’.” (5).

Whether normalization of failure occurs naturally over a period of time or is deliberately orchestrated by an organization, the“intelligent failure” approach of eliminating negative emotions relies on removing interference from learning from failureexperiences in hopes of enhancing persistence. This may be difficult to achieve. “While companies are beginning to accept thevalue of failure in the abstract – at the level of the corporate policies, processes, and practices – it's an entirely different matter atthe personal level. Everyone hates to fail.” (Farson and Keyes, 2002: 4). We now turn to the challenges of normalizing failureconsistent with an intelligent failure approach.

3.3.1. Challenges of failure normalizationThe preceding observations on normalizing failure to eliminate grief do not consider two important implications. First, while

normalization provides a benefit from a reduction in grief that can interfere with learning and subsequent performance, it alsodiminishes the learning benefits such emotion can trigger. By changing the emotions of failure from one of a strong negativeemotional reaction to neutrality (or even mildly positive emotion), this strategy of intelligent failure may suffer the samelimitations Sitkin (1992) directed toWeick's (1984) strategy of “small wins”. That is, neutrality of emotions can induce a low levelof attention and reduced information search because emotional events receive higher priority in processing information than dothose that are neutral (Ellis et al., 1971). Moreover, evidence suggests that negative emotional events elicit more attention andinformation processing than positive emotional events (Wood et al., 1990). Negative emotions signal the importance of an eventand, thereby, direct attention to those core and precipitating events for the purpose of scanning for significant information (Weick,1979) and encouraging change (Lazarus, 1993). In a similar way, grief results from the appraisal that something important has

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been lost (Luce et al., 1997). Therefore, the signaling that occurs through recognition that a failure event has occurred can promoteadaptation and improve coping by directing attention (Schwarz and Clore, 1988) and resources to circumstances surrounding theevent (Pieters and van Raaij, 1988) and to learning from the experience (Cacioppo et al., 1999).

Second, processes that eliminate grief from project failure could also reduce subsequent commitments to project creation anddevelopment. That is, grief is in response to the loss of something that is emotionally important; to eliminate the generation ofnegative emotions likely involves a reduction in the emotional importance of the project, e.g., the commitment necessary forcreative innovations (Amabile, 2000). Moreover, reduced importance increases the likelihood of project failure. Lower creativity(Amabile, 1997, 2000) and less commitment by the project leader (Song and Parry, 1997) and members of the team (Amabile,2000) are all associated with poor project performance.

An organizational member and his or her entrepreneurial project are roughly analogous to a doctor and his or her cancerpatients. To the extent the doctor becomes desensitized to the death of his or her patients, he or she engages in depersonalization;that is, communicationwith patients and patients' families becomes negative, callous, or even excessively detached, leading to lesseffective patient care (Peeters and Le Blanc, 2001). Like for doctors facingmultiple deaths, organizational members facing multiplefailures may become desensitized to failure, reducing commitment to subsequent projects. Given the limitations of thenormalization approach, we turn next to another approach — regulation.

3.4. Managing failure by emotion regulation: a coping with failure approach

Emotion regulation “is the term used to characterize the process and characteristics involved in coping with heightened levelsof positive and negative emotions” (Kopp, 1989: 343). In this case we focus on the heightened negative emotions of griefgenerated from project failure and investigate regulation in terms of how individuals mobilize the motivation, cognitive resourcesand courses of action needed to recover from that project failure. Specifically, we rely on social cognitive theory to highlight therole of coping self-efficacy in explaining individuals' adaptation to the demands of adversity. We apply this notion of coping self-efficacy to the adversity of project failure and then investigate how organization can facilitate this process of emotion regulation.We then specify the organizational conditionswhen this approach is likely to lead to superior learning and commitment outcomes.

3.4.1. Grief, coping self-efficacy, and subsequent entrepreneurial projectsSocial cognitive theory (Bandura, 1986) has been used recently to gain a deeper understanding of human functioning,

particularly, self-regulation by those coping with trauma (Benight et al., 1999). Like failure, trauma involves an event that triggersa negative emotional reaction that can interfere with effective human functioning (Janoff-Bulman, 1992). Coping involvesthoughts and behaviors that people use to manage the internal and external demands of situations that are appraised as stressful(Lazarus and Folkman, 1984) and are initiated “in response to the individual's appraisal that important goals have been harmed,lost, or threatened [generating] negative emotions that are often intense” (Folkman and Moskowitz, 2004: 747). In the presentcontext, it is the entrepreneurial project that is lost, generating grief that could be intense and internalized. Coping with projectfailure represents the thoughts and behaviors that organizational members use to recover from grief over project failure.

A central tenant of social cognitive theory is that “people tend to avoid activities and situations they believe will exceed theircoping capabilities, but they readily undertake challenging activities and pick social environments they judge themselves capableof managing” (Wood and Bandura, 1989: 365). Generally, self-efficacy refers to “beliefs in one's capabilities to mobilize themotivation, cognitive resources, and courses of action needed to meet given situational demands” (Wood and Bandura, 1989:408). Self-efficacy is typically believed to be task specific (Bandura, 1997). For example, self-efficacy in an entrepreneurshipcontext has been defined in terms of “the degree to which individuals believe they are capable of performing the tasks associatedwith new-venture management” (Forbes, 2005: 628) and as confidence in one's ability to grow the business (Baum and Locke,2004: 593). In the corporate entrepreneurship context, coping self-efficacy refers to the beliefs in one's capabilities to mobilize themotivation, cognitive resources, and courses of action needed to recover from major setbacks arising from the organization'sentrepreneurial activities. Specific to project failure, coping self-efficacy can help organizational members mobilize the motivation,cognitive resources, and courses of action needed to recover from the grief suffered from an entrepreneurial project's failure.

Those with low coping self-efficacy perceive a large gap between their coping capabilities and detrimental aspects of theenvironment. This perception of their inability to cope with the situation often has the effect of magnifying the severity of thethreat and increasing worry about other perils. Individuals with low coping self-efficacy also feel powerless to rid their minds ofaversive thoughts (Bandura, 1997; Lazarus and Folkman, 1984). Individuals with high coping self-efficacy are less likely to add totheir cognitive burden, feel more powerful to control potentially obtrusive thoughts, and are more proactive towards shaping thesituation so that it becomes less threatening (Bandura et al., 1985). As an example, for trauma survivors of Hurricane Opal,perceived coping self-efficacy was a keymediator in determining for whom this event resulted in enduring distress (Benight et al.,1999).

Beyond coping with trauma, initial evidence suggests self-efficacy mediates the relationship between a major loss and griefrecovery. In a study of 102 widows who had lost their husbands to cancer within the previous 12 months, those widows withhigher coping self-efficacy with respect to their loss faced less emotional distress as well as greater psychological and physicalwell-being (Benight et al., 2001). Recovery from grief allows people to move on and make new commitments (Fisher, 2001). Itappears that “a robust sense of coping self-efficacy is accompanied by benign appraisals of potential threats, weaker stressreactions to them, less ruminative preoccupationwith them, better behavioral management of threats, and faster recovery of well-being from any experienced distress over them” (Benight and Bandura, 2003: 1133). Coping self-efficacy plays a key role in

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explaining people's stress reactions and the effectiveness of their coping strategies in threatening situations (Bandura, 1997), aswell as persistence in the face of obstacles (Bandura, 1986).

Extending findings of coping self-efficacy from traumas caused by natural disasters and the loss of loved ones, we propose thatthere is heterogeneity in members' coping self-efficacy and this can help explain variation in the effectiveness of regulating griefover project failure. To the extent that normalization eliminates negative emotions from project failure, a member's self-efficacyfor recovering from grief will have little to no impact on learning from the experience or on the motivation to commit tosubsequent projects because even those low in coping self-efficacy believe that they are capable of recovering from such low levelsof grief. However, when there is little normalization, memberswith high coping self-efficacy can better regulate negative emotionsto capitalize on learning benefits from emotional signaling and maintain subsequent commitment. We offer the followingpropositions, as illustrated in Fig. 1, as part of a larger model developed below in subsequent sections and illustrated in Fig. 2.

Although we expect approaches to failure management that enhance learning to also enhance commitment for subsequentprojects, these outcomes may vary independently and, therefore, we offer them as separate hypotheses.

Proposition 1. (a) For those with high coping self-efficacy, learning from project failure increases with grief to a point upon whichfurther increases in grief decrease learning. (b) For those with low coping, learning from project failure decreases as grief increases.

Proposition 2. (a) For those with high coping self-efficacy, commitment to subsequent projects increases with grief to a point uponwhich further increases in grief decrease commitment. (b) For those with low coping, commitment to subsequent projects decreases asgrief increases.

3.4.2. Organizations enhancing grief regulation and subsequent entrepreneurial projectsThe organizations in which people work affect their thoughts, feelings and actions in the workplace (Brief and Weiss, 2002).

The bereavement literature highlights examples of organizations that facilitate social support through the creation of supportgroups and rituals designed to help the bereft cope with grief (Archer, 1999). Support groups and rituals are mechanisms throughwhich organizations provide the opportunity for organizational members to interact with others who have experienced a feltsense of loss. By interacting with others who have experienced similar grief-inducing events, individuals can model copingbehaviors and build their coping self-efficacy skills.

Support groups are used to assist in the regulation of emotion in a number of contexts, particularly in relation to the loss of aloved one. Over half of all hospices in the US offer support groups to help individuals deal with grief over the loss of a loved one(Foliart et al., 2001). Balk et al. (1993) offer a description of goals typical of such support groups.

“The goal of the social support group meetings was to facilitate coping with grief and to assist in resolving the difficultiesassociated with mourning through education regarding adaptive tasks and coping skills pertinent to life crises and throughopening channels of communication between groups…” (Balk et al., 1993: 432).

Self-help groups are the most common form of social support group (also known as peer or mutual support groups), partlybecause of their low cost and the perception by participants of a low-threat environment (Caserta and Lund, 1996). Self-helpgroups are often led by a peer who has previously and successfully coped with a major loss— leaders in the self-help model do notact as counselors or therapists but, rather, facilitate the group process (Caserta and Lund, 1996). Self-help support groups, forexample, offer their members emotional support and information sharing in an encouraging environment and, by doing so, enabletheir members to more effectively recover from grief (c.f., Hopmeyer and Werk, 1994). Most importantly for purposes of thecurrent discussion, support groups are an example of a mechanism used by organizations to provide social support that helps

Fig. 1. Grief, coping self-efficacy and learning from project failure and commitment to subsequent projects.

Fig. 2. Conceptual model of recovering from grief over project failure.

5 Social support not only builds self-efficacy, but self-efficacy can build social support (Holahan and Holahan, 1987), possibly leading to a virtuous circle.

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individuals who experience failure to learn coping skills and gain the confidence needed to face new challenges (Caserta and Lund,1993).

Support groups exist in organizations to assist members with specific concerns from outside the work place that affect their jobperformance (e.g., alcohol abuse, marital discord, death of a loved one) (Kahnweiler and Riordan, 1998). Other support groups areoffered by organizations to deal with traumatic events that occur within the organization, such as massive change efforts includingdownsizing (Esty, 1987). Social support is also offered through the informal bonds members form with others in the organization(Riordan and Griffeth, 1995).

In a study of 816 Dutch oncology care providers, those who received social support from colleagues were more able to copewith the emotional demands of the job without becoming callous, indifferent, or otherwise detached from the circumstances oftheir patients; that is, without relying on depersonalization (Peeters and Le Blanc, 2001). Therefore, while coping self-efficacy is anindividual's belief in one's ability to cope, organizational mechanisms of social exchange can provide avenues for organizationalmembers to support each other and, in doing so, play a role in developing a member's coping self-efficacy. More specifically, socialsupport can serve an enabling function — “supporters model coping attitudes and skills, provide incentives for engagement inbeneficial activities, and motivate others by showing that difficulties are surmountable by perseverant effort” (Benight andBandura, 2003: 1134). As an enabler, social support can enhance self-efficacy. Indeed, after a review of mediational analysesconducted across a wide variety of contexts and populations (e.g., Benight et al., 1999), Benight and Bandura (2003) concludedthat social support produces beneficial outcomes only to the extent that it raises perceived self-efficacy to manage environmentaldemands.5 To the extent that so-cial support can help organizational members build their efficacy for recovering from griefgenerated by project failure, they are effective in helping that member learn from project failure and remain committed tosubsequent projects.

Organizations also use rituals as a mechanism for regulating grief. Rituals represent “standardized, detailed sets of techniquesand behaviors that the culture prescribes to manage anxieties and express common identities” (Trice and Beyer, 1993: 80). Thebenefits of funeral rituals may extend beyond the loss of a loved one in a community to the loss of something important within anorganizational context. Harris and Sutton (1986) offered a grounded theory of parting ceremonies for displacedworkers caused byorganizational death by analyzing 11 parties, picnics, and dinners that occurred in 6 dying organizations. They proposed thatparting ceremonies serve the purposes of providing emotional support for the workers and facilitating the editing of their schema.As organizations die, (former) employees are likely to 1) have a negative emotional response to that loss andmourn and 2) benefitfrom the emotional support provided by the rituals of parting ceremonies. In particular, these rituals enhance individuals' self-efficacy for coping with loss.

A similar process could be used by organizations when an entrepreneurial project fails — that is, offer some form of parting orfuneral ritual. In fact, many companies have used rituals to address failure (see McCune, 1997). For example, Ore-Ida, a subsidiaryof H. J. Heinz, shot off a cannon in celebration when it identified a “perfect failure” (Peters and Waterman, 1982). Likewise, EliLilly's chief scientific officer threw “perfect failure” parties to commemorate excellent scientific work that, nevertheless, resultedin failure (Burton, 2004: 1). The shooting of a cannon or any other ritual that symbolizes the death of a project can be effective inenhancing learning from failure by providing a means for building organizational members' coping self-efficacy. It does this byproviding a forum for social support that aids in the grief recovery process. Knowing that social support will always be there (i.e.,social support is ritualized) builds members' confidence that they can cope with grief over project failure. Thus,

Proposition 3. The relationship between social support and learning from project failure is mediated by coping self-efficacy.

Proposition 4. The relationship between social support and commitment to subsequent projects is mediated by coping self-efficacy.

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Fig. 2 depicts the relationships posited in Propositions 1–4 as well as the key direct and interaction effects alluded to in earlierdiscussions.

4. Discussion

In today's competitive environment, the successful pursuit of growth and strategic renewal via the exploitation ofentrepreneurial opportunities is a common goal of corporations. However, entrepreneurial projects are essentially experimentswith unknowable outcomes and frequent entrepreneurial project failure is inevitable among firms that practice corporateentrepreneurship. Although failure has been acknowledged in the corporate entrepreneurship process, the effects of grief have notbeen explored in this context. Managing the grief process represents a particularly salient task in the context of corporateentrepreneurship practice because the commitment to a project essential for success also generates grief when it fails, and projectfailure is a common occurrence.

The learning from failure literature has acknowledged the role of negative emotions on members' abilities to learn from failureby primarily focusing on how negative emotions interfere with information processing (e.g., Sitkin, 1992).6 Such “intelligentfailure” approaches implicitly assume that with emotional interference removed learning will 1) automatically occur and 2) beapplied by a motivated individual. However, our approach challenges both these assumptions. First, negative emotions, such asgrief, benefit learning by signaling the importance of an event. By eliminating grief not only is emotional interference reduced butalso the signaling that directs attention for learning purposes. Organizational members that manage grief through regulation,rather than elimination, benefit from this emotional signaling. Second, emotion andmotivation are linked. Our approach proposesthat organizational members who are more desensitized to project failure are also less committed to subsequent projects.

4.1. Theoretical and managerial implications

Our paper has several important theoretical implications. First, we do not propose that regulation is always superior to thenormalization of negative emotions arising from project failure but, consistent with most strategies, the appropriateness of oneapproach over another depends on the firm's endowment of resources and/or the resources it can access (Barney, 1991). Theresource in this case is employees' coping self-efficacy and it is valuable when combined with a regulation approach to managinggrief over project failure and not highly valuable when combined with a normalization approach. If a firm does not have anendowment of individuals with high coping self-efficacy, then this resource can be developed through organizational routines thatprovide social support and rituals that build organizational members' coping self-efficacy. To the extent that these social supportmechanisms are idiosyncratic and causally ambiguous, they may be a source of sustainable competitive advantage forentrepreneurial firms that pursue a grief regulation approach to project failure. Firms pursuing a normalization approach do notneed to be concerned with selecting employees with high coping self-efficacy or implementing routines for building it. This doesnot suggest that routines for “celebrating failure” or providing social support are not important or a possible source of sustainablecompetitive advantage for a normalization approach, but the mechanism is different. The benefits of these routines fornormalization arise from the extent to which they diminish or eliminate the negative emotions arising from project failure and notfrom building organizational members' self-efficacy for coping with grief once it is generated.

Second, the specific message sent by an organization regarding the value of project failure is central to distinguishingbetween the normalization and regulation approaches to grief management. For example, social support groups could be usedto convey either that 1) failure will likely occur at some or many points when entrepreneurial projects are pursued and, as such,project team members must learn to accept failures without grieving over them (a normalization approach message) or that2) grieving over entrepreneurial project failures is essential if the “healing” process that promotes insights on the failureexperience and renewed commitment to new projects is to occur (a regulation approach message). Thus, it is not the presenceor absence of social support mechanisms that distinguish between the normalization and regulation approaches to griefmanagement. Rather, the meaning and value ascribed to project failure within an organization is the major point ofdifferentiation between alternative grief management approaches. As such, an organization's outlook on failure – as reflected in,for example, its culture – may be a major determinant of the ease of adoption and success of normalization versus regulationapproaches to grief management.

Likewise, an organization's outlook on failure may affect the degree to which it is able to attract and retain employeeswith low versus high coping self-efficacy. For example, individuals with low coping self-efficacy may avoid working inorganizations where social support mechanisms are not available to temper the sting and eliminate the stigma of failedentrepreneurial projects. By contrast, the presence of such social support mechanisms may not be a major basis of appeal forindividuals whose coping self-efficacy is high, but neither will it be an aversion. Thus, building social support mechanismsto enhance coping self-efficacy can only benefit firms in terms of attracting and retaining individuals who are variouslyproficient at coping with grief.

6 Learning from successful initiatives will often present its own, unique set of challenges. For example, success can breed organizational inertia (Hannan andFreeman, 1977) and an implicit belief that the causal mechanisms which led to that success are fully understood. Conscious consideration of why the initiativewas successful may never occur, or incorrect attributions will be made. Miller (1992) described this phenomenon as the Icarus Paradox. Because those involvedin the initiative will have had their efforts validated through its success, the confirmation of prior assumptions will often eclipse the acquisition of newknowledge when initiatives are successful.

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Our paper also has implications for organizations pursuing corporate entrepreneurship activity. Management has anopportunity to build an important resource in its members – coping self-efficacy – to enhance their learning and motivation. Asargued, social support practices such as the use of support groups and rituals can be instrumental to building members' copingself-efficacy. Management can utilize an organizational member's high coping self-efficacy to benefit from grief over project failureor compensate for an organizational member's low coping self-efficacy by instituting normalization processes.

As a practical matter, a normalization strategy for managing project failure-induced grief would involve communications,policies, and norms which convey that failed entrepreneurial projects are common, to be predicted and, in general, “no big deal.”The creation of a culture in which failure is normalized takes the emotional aversiveness out of failure and substitutes an“acceptance”mindset inwhich emotional neutrality is the targeted responsewhen project failure occurs.When negative emotionsare neutralized, a significant hindrance to learning is eliminated (Mathews et al., 1990). By contrast, a regulation strategy formanaging project failure-induced grief would involve use of the types of social support discussed earlier as means not foreliminating the negative emotional response resulting from project failure but as means for developing individuals' coping self-efficacy through which those individuals can channel their grief into productive outcomes — i.e., learning and commitment tofuture projects.

The sacrifice of a normalization strategy over a regulation strategy is that failure will cease to be a possible catalyst for learningand renewed commitment to entrepreneurial projects when it is emotionally neutralized. Thus, while normalization of projectfailure can reduce the emotional interference that hinders learning and commitment, the absence of an emotional response can,likewise, preclude learning and commitment from reaching their highest levels. These observations beg the question of what, then,should organizations do to leverage the possible benefits of entrepreneurial project failure? A defensible heuristic is to normalizefailure if the building of individuals' coping self-efficacy proves elusive, but to focus organizational efforts first and foremost on theestablishment of social support mechanisms that foster the development of individuals' coping self-efficacy. The promotion ofindividuals' coping self-efficacy in entrepreneurial firms will be facilitated when the practice of corporate entrepreneurshipreflects certain attributes. Two attributes may be particularly conducive to the emergence of coping self-efficacy amongindividuals involved in entrepreneurial projects.

First, firms that embrace a portfolio approach to the pursuit of entrepreneurial projects may most readily develop coping self-efficacy among their corporate entrepreneurs. This is because portfolio mindsets can enable individuals to redefine their conceptsof failure inmore psychologically and organizationally productiveways. Consistent with this point, McGrath et al., (2006: 53) offerthe following advice based on their study of corporate venturing activity within Nokia Corporation: “Manage with a portfoliomindset, not a project mindset, to maximize the company's benefit from venturing.” The specific link between a portfolio mindsetand the development of coping self-efficacy is that, under a portfolio mindset, individuals can better appreciate the valuablelinkages that exist between projects. Even projects that fail are seen as being of some potential value if the efforts devoted to thoseprojects lead to the creation of knowledge or other valuable resources that can be productively deployed elsewhere within theportfolio. Thus, with a portfolio mindset there will be few, if any, “complete failures”. And while the pain of individual projectfailures may still be felt in portfolio contexts, the larger picture of how failures may contribute to subsequent successes may bemore easily appreciated when the innovative unit of consequence is the entrepreneurial project portfolio rather than theindividual project. Of particular significance, social support aimed at helping individuals deal with grief are generally assumed tobe most successful when they enable the bereft to view their circumstances in a more positive light (Archer, 1999). This isprecisely what a portfolio mindset can do for corporate entrepreneurs whose projects fail.

A second attribute of corporate entrepreneurship practice that may be conducive to the emergence of coping self-efficacyamong individuals involved in entrepreneurial projects is the utilization of dedicated corporate innovation units. The“entrepreneurial imperative” that exists in established corporations (c.f., Burgelman and Valikangas, 2005) is often discussed as“everyone's” responsibility (e.g., McGrath and MacMillan, 2000). Therefore, entrepreneurial initiatives can and, arguably, shouldemerge from multiple functional areas and hierarchical levels throughout the organization. Nonetheless, from the perspective ofbuilding coping self-efficacy among corporate entrepreneurs as a means to appropriate value from project failures, there is benefitin structurally positioning planned entrepreneurial projects within dedicated organizational units. Birkinshaw and Hill (2005)have suggested that corporate venturing units are particularly promising organizational vehicles throughwhich innovation shouldbe pursued because they agglomerate entrepreneurial projects in a structural sense and, thereby, facilitate the development ofinnovative capabilities. The structural agglomeration of planned entrepreneurial projects within dedicated units can also facilitatethe emergence of 1) subcultures in which the uncertain outcomes of entrepreneurial projects are better understood and 2)routines through which underperforming projects can be terminated or otherwise managed (Kanter, 1989). The inevitability ofentrepreneurial project failure in organizational units dedicated to innovation encourages the adoption of social supportmechanisms as means for developing failure-related coping skills. When innovation is the mission of an organizational unit, thefailure of innovative projects within those units will, naturally, become salient concerns for their members and grief will be apredictable consequence of project failures even though such failures may be commonplace. Importantly, the need in dedicatedcorporate innovation units for social support mechanisms that enable corporate entrepreneurs to cope with failure-related griefwill likely ensure their use and hone their effectiveness, thereby building individuals' coping self-efficacy.

4.2. Future research

Although in this paper we focused on an organizational member's grief, learning and commitment, there is a need for futureresearch to explore related issues at different levels of analysis and perhaps a multi-level theory of learning from failure focused

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on, for example, the individual, project team, organization and inter-organization levels of analysis. Furthermore, while wefocused on how social support can build coping self-efficacy, future research needs to explore how coping self-efficacy is related tobuilding social support. It is our intention that this paper helps encourage future research on the important and nuanced topic ofmanaging learning from failure.

We encourage future research to empirically test the above propositions and develop theory that extends them. Although notsimple, a number of studies have demonstrated a range of methods to test theories of how learning can be influenced by anindividual's efficacy, ability, and motivation (Lorenzet et al., 2005; Martocchio, 1994). In this paper, the event is a project failureand testing requires the operationalization of 1) an organizational member's self-efficacy in recovering from the grief experiencedover project failure, 2) the nature and level of social support, and 3) the learning and commitment-to-future-project outcomesthat are possibly associatedwith the failed entrepreneurial initiatives. The following paragraphs briefly describe how each of thesevariables might be operationalized.

Self-efficacy measures need to be task specific (Bandura, 1986). While coping self-efficacy measures have been developed forsome outcomes (e.g., surviving hurricanes Benight et al., 1999 and losing a spouse Benight et al., 2001), they require adaptationand validation for testing the specific coping self-efficacy central to our model— a belief in one's grief recovery ability. The level ofsocial support has also been measured in a number of studies (e.g., Collins, 2001), including within organizations (e.g., Deelstra etal., 2003), yet further work is required in adapting these measures to capture the level of social support for coping with grief overproject failure and with normalizing failure.

Two outcomes of failed entrepreneurial projects were reviewed in the proposed grief recovery model — learning from thefailure experience and commitment to subsequent entrepreneurial project. In the interests of brevity, only the former will beaddressed here. In particular, learning from entrepreneurial project failures might be assessed by asking the participatingentrepreneurial team members to indicate the extent to which the experiences surrounding the defunct projects contributed tothe acquisition of new knowledge in particular areas. In the case of an internal corporate venture, these areas could include newknowledge pertaining to, for example, the determinants of demand in the venture's targeted market, important attributes of theventure's product and/or service offerings, competitive dynamics in the venture's industry, success requirements in the venture'stargeted market, and important qualities of a viable competitive strategy for the venture.

For empirically investigating the propositions presented in this paper, the choice of control variables is important (as with allempirical studies). For example, there is likely a positive relationship between experimenting with entrepreneurial initiatives andorganizational attempts to provide social support to enhance learning from failure that could confound results if the extent ofexperimentation is not taken into consideration. One possible solution is to choose samples that capture those firms where projectfailure is more likely and learning from failure is more important (e.g., firms with a high entrepreneurial orientation Covin et al.,2006 or firms in dynamic environments Zahra, 1993). Within such samples there is likely considerable variance in the extent towhich organizational mechanisms of social exchange provide social support in a way that builds members' self-efficacy forrecovery from grief over project failure. In investigating the ability andmotivation of organizational members to learn from failure,empirical studies will also need to control for such variables as the nature of the failure, the likelihood that a particular type offailure could occur again, and the project stage at which the failure occurred.

Moving beyond the specific relationships discussed in this paper to research foci that build from the current observations, twospecific areas for inquiry are proposed. First, scholars should seek to better understand the relationships between variousmodes of“handling” entrepreneurial project failures and learning from those failures. Although this paper has argued that experiencinggrief may increase the saliency of the failure event and, thereby, facilitate learning among those with high coping self-efficacy, theorganizational responses to failure that induce grief may be very diverse and differentially likely to lead to positive outcomes. Forexample, grief may emerge as an emotional response to project failure in firms that openly call attention to failure as well as infirms that attempt to quickly bury failure by not discussing it or otherwise acknowledging it. However, the former mode ofhandling failure may have stronger ties to productive learning because opportunities to reflect on the failed entrepreneurialinitiative are not blocked.

A second suggested domain for future research relates to the possible need for intermittent successes among individuals whoseentrepreneurial projects routinely fail. Specifically, while experiencing grief may facilitate learning among those with high copingself-efficacy, perhaps this only holds when some percentage of entrepreneurial project success is sprinkled throughout thefailures. Consistent with the tenets of classical conditioning theory, nothing but failure would likely discourage even the mostresilient of individuals and, thereby, impede learning from failure and commitment to subsequent projects. As such, a study of therelationship between entrepreneurial outcome success rate (or the success–failure pattern) and learning from failure could bequite informative.

5. Conclusion

The grief that predictably accompanies the occurrence of failure is not a challenge unique to the corporate entrepreneurshipdomain. However, the benefits of building self-efficacy in regulating grief to facilitate learning from failure are likely to besubstantial within this domain. Those corporate entrepreneurs with such self-efficacy are likely more willing to pursue newentrepreneurial projects despite having possibly faced repeated failures in the past. As argued by Peters (1990), keeping corporateentrepreneurs in the “batter's box” is a prerequisite to innovation success. By building organizational member's self-efficacy ingrief recovery, some organizations have been able to create a general willingness of would-be corporate entrepreneurs to step upto the plate, bringing the knowledge acquired through past entrepreneurial efforts with them.

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