Moving Forward from Project Failure: Negative Emotions, Affective Commitment, and Learning from the Experience

Project managers’ overconfidence: how is risk reflected in anticipated project success?

“…Failed projects are a major topic in academia (Shepherd et al 2011) as well as in project management magazines, blogs, and mass media (Huff and Prybutok 2008). Most experienced project managers are likely to have first hand experience with failed projects or missed targets, due to the occurrence of risks which impact project outcomes (Jugdev and Müller 2005;Raz et al 2002).…”

The Importance of Trailblazing Scholarship for Understanding Entrepreneurship

“…3, we build on our previous work (e.g., Shepherd, 2003;Shepherd, Patzelt, Williams, & Warnecke, 2014;Shepherd, Patzelt, & Wolfe, 2011) to acknowledge the frequency of failure given the uncertainty of the entrepreneurial process-failure of projects within an established firm and the failure of entrepreneurial firms. We then highlight how future research can make an important contribution to knowledge and open up new ground for subsequent research by exploring (1) the financial, social, and psychological consequences of failure; (2) the inter-relationships between the financial, social, and/ or psychological outcomes of experiencing failure, including magnifying and dampening effects; and (3) the processes of sensemaking and learning from failure, especially those related to developing plausible stories of failure.…”

Attention and Entrepreneurial Cognition

“…Second, managers' prior failure experience influences how they allocate attention in future decisions about project terminations-an impact that goes beyond their emotions and learning from failure (McGrath 1999;Shepherd et al 2009Shepherd et al , 2011Shepherd et al , 2013Shepherd et al , 2014. Specifically, more prior failure experiences accelerate how an entrepreneurial project's low strategic fit enhances the probability that a project is terminated.…”