Learning from Entrepreneurial Failure
Emotions, Cognitions, and Actions

Provides an in-depth examination of the psychological obstacles to learning from entrepreneurial failure and how these can be overcome.

Dean A. Shepherd (Author), Trenton Williams (Author), Marcus Wolfe (Author), Holger Patzelt (Author)

9781107569836, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 15 March 2018

341 pages, 12 b/w illus.
23 x 15.3 x 2 cm, 0.53 kg

'The authors fulfilled their goal of describing the cognitions and emotions of entrepreneurs of failed ventures. The book has value for organizational psychologists and researchers of entrepreneurship.' William Holcomb, PsycCRITIQUES

Learning from Entrepreneurial Failure provides an important counterweight to the multitude of books that focus on entrepreneurial success. Failure is by far the most common scenario for new ventures and a critical part of the entrepreneurial process is learning from failure and having the motivation to try again. This book examines the various obstacles to learning from failure and explores how they can be overcome. A range of topics are discussed that include: why some people have a more negative emotional reaction to failure than others and how these negative emotions can be managed; why some people delay the decision to terminate a poorly performing entrepreneurial venture; anti-failure biases and stigmatism in organizations and society; and the role that the emotional content of narratives plays in the sense-making process. This thought-provoking book will appeal to academic researchers, graduate students and professionals in the fields of entrepreneurship and industrial psychology.

Acknowledgements
1. Introduction
2. Grief over entrepreneurial failures
3. Self-compassion and learning from failure
4. Anticipatory grief, persistence, and recovery
5. Delaying project failure as creeping death
6. Emotional intelligence, emotional capability, and both grief recovery and sense-making
7. Stigma over failure and impression management
8. Narratives of entrepreneurial failure
9. What can we do to learn more from our failure experiences?
Index.

Subject Areas: Entrepreneurship [KJH], Business innovation [KJD], Occupational & industrial psychology [JMJ]