As the importance of failure is widely recognized, there is increasing research interest in the antecedents of learning from failure. Basing on affective event theory, the current study cast light on individuals’ cognition of error and proposed that employees with higher levels of error learning orientation tend to show more positive grieving after project failure, which in turn increases their learning from failure. Using a sample of 752 employees from 140 project teams, we found empirical evidence to support this theoretical model. Our results indicated that positive grieving mediated the relationship between error learning orientation and learning from failure. Besides, the relationship between error learning orientation and positive grieving is more positive for employees with lower levels of fear of face loss. Our findings help enrich the antecedents of learning from failure by shedding light on how and when error learning orientation matters. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

The clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat (CRISPR)-CRISPR-associated protein 9 (Cas9) gene-editing technology has been used to inactivate viral DNA as a new strategy to eliminate chronic viral infections, including HIV-1. This utility of CRISPR-Cas9 is challenged by the high heterogeneity of HIV-1 sequences, which requires the design of the single guide RNA (sgRNA; utilized by the CRISPR-Cas9 system to recognize the target DNA) to match a specific HIV-1 strain in an HIV patient. One solution to this challenge is to target the viral primer binding site (PBS), which HIV-1 copies from cellular tRNA in each round of reverse transcription and is thus conserved in almost all HIV-1 strains. In this study, we demonstrate that PBS-targeting sgRNA directs Cas9 to cleave the PBS DNA, which evokes deletions or insertions (indels) and strongly diminishes the production of infectious HIV-1. While HIV-1 escapes from PBS-targeting Cas9/sgRNA, unique resistance mechanisms are observed that are dependent on whether the plus or the minus strand of the PBS DNA is bound by sgRNA. Characterization of these viral escape mechanisms will inform future engineering of Cas9 variants that can more potently and persistently inhibit HIV-1 infection. The results of this study demonstrate that the gene-editing complex Cas9/sgRNA can be programmed to target and cleave HIV-1 PBS DNA, and thus, inhibit HIV-1 infection. Given that almost all HIV-1 strains have the same PBS, which is copied from the cellular tRNA during reverse transcription, PBS-targeting sgRNA can be used to inactivate HIV-1 DNA of different strains. We also discovered that HIV-1 uses different mechanisms to resist Cas9/sgRNAs, depending on whether they target the plus or the minus strand of PBS DNA. These findings allow us to predict that a Cas9 variant that uses the CCA sequence as the protospacer adjacent motif (PAM) should more strongly and persistently suppress HIV-1 replication. Together, these data have identified the PBS as the target DNA of Cas9/sgRNA and have predicted how to improve Cas9/sgRNA to achieve more efficient and sustainable suppression of HIV-1 infection, therefore improving the capacity of Cas9/sgRNA in curing HIV-1 infection.

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Facing a remarkably changing world, researchers have gradually shifted emphasis from successful experiences to failures. In the current study, we build a model to explore the relationship between project commitment and learning from failure, and test how emotion (i.e., perceived shame after failure) and cognition (i.e., attribution for failure) affect this process. After randomly selecting 400 firms from the list of high-tech firms reported by the Beijing Municipal Science and Technology Commission, we use a two-wave investigation of the employees, and the final sample consists of 140 teams from 58 companies in the technology industry in mainland China. The results provide evidence for the positive role of personal control attribution in the relationship between project commitment and learning from failure. However, in contrast to previous studies, perceived shame, as the negative emotion after failed events, could bring desirable outcomes during this process. Based on the results, we further expand a model to explain the behavioral responses after failure, and the implications of our findings for research and practice are discussed.The failures and reverses which await men - and one after another sadden the brow of youth - add a dignity to the prospect of human life, which no Arcadian success would do.—Henry David Thoreau

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The emotional experience brought about by failure, especially the important roles of negative emotions in learning behavior after failure, has received increasingly more attention from organization management scholars. Research on the impact of employees’ sense of failure-induced shame is still controversial. Based on the Chinese context, according to the process model of emotion regulation theory, we have studied the influence of failure-induced shame on employees’ learning from failure and the conditions that have boundary effects on this process. Through a questionnaire analysis of 776 samples from Chinese high-tech enterprises, the results show the following: (1) shame has a negative relationship with learning from failure (2) project commitment alleviates the negative relationship between shame and learning from failure, and (3) restoration orientation alleviates the negative relationship between shame and learning from failure while loss orientation cannot. Our results further enrich the research on negative emotions related to failure and provide a theoretical basis for the failure management of Chinese companies.

Considering failure is a common result in project management, how to effectively learn from failure has becoming a more and more important topic for managers. Drawing on the goal orientation theory and grief recovery theory, the purpose of this paper is to clarify the impact of learning goal orientation on learning from failure. Furthermore, this paper examines the mediating effect of two negative emotion coping orientations (restoration orientation and loss orientation) and the moderating effect of positive grieving in this relationship. The results indicated that: (1) A learning goal orientation is positively related to learning from failure; (2) As a dual-path mediation model, restoration orientation and loss orientation mediate the relationship between a learning goal orientation and learning from failure; and (3) Positive grieving negatively moderates the relationship between a loss orientation and learning from failure.

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