Vicarious Learning, Undersampling of Failure, and the Myths of Management

By Jerker Denrell. Organ. Sci., 2003

505 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Accounting, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6244700c459577740c187fbfa1d875433340322f

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Citations in the corpus

Leadership Process Models: A Review and Synthesis (2017, background): “…must be considered in pattern matching, whether these relations are ultimately quantified or not (Maxwell, 2010); these issues concern sampling (cf. Denrell, 2003) to ensure that outcomes vary via contrasting cases of, for example, high- and low-performing teams (cf. Eisenhardt & Graebner, 2007)…”
Selective Sampling of Empirical Settings in Organizational Studies (2008, background): “Researchers have long been aware of the problems caused by selection bias (Tobin, 1958; Heckman, 1979; Berk, 1983; Tuma and Hannan, 1984; King, Keohane, and Verba, 1994; Denrell, 2003).”
When Firms are Desperate to Grow via Acquisition: The Effect of Growth Patterns and Acquisition Experience on Acquisition Premiums (2011, background): “In terms of their growth, firms will set their own growth goals relative to the growth levels of others in their referent groups (Elsbach and Kramer, 1996; Denrell, 2003).”
Back to basics: Behavioral theory and internationalization (2020, background): “The organizations and strategies that are often observed, are those which have survived the selection process and achieved success (Denrell, 2003).”
Learning Sequences: Their Existence, Effect, and Evolution (2012, background): “The frequent result is imitation of seemingly successful practices (Denrell, 2003).”
Keep Calm and Carry On: Emotion Regulation in Entrepreneurs’ Learning from Failure (2018, background): “However, despite the educational value of failure and a high failure rate in entrepreneurship (Denrell, 2003), there remains a significant under sampling of failure cases in entrepreneurship education (Shepherd, 2004).”
Charisma: An Ill-Defined and Ill-Measured Gift (2016, result): “…variable— that is, assuming what successful cases have in common drives their success without having compared these cases to a control group (Denrell 2003)—or (b) regression to the mean 34 (Kahneman 2011), a statistical phenomenon explaining why successful performance can depend on luck or…”
A framework for examining leadership in extreme contexts (2009, background): “…the traditional approaches to theory development focused on expected outcomes (Mohr, 1982), we suggest studying extreme contexts requires that researchers consider modeling effects where there are high levels of variability in outcomes (e.g. Cabral, 2003; Denrell, 2003; Kalnins, 2007; March, 1991).”
Risk and rationality in entrepreneurial processes (2007, background): “Entrepreneurs may be susceptible to undersampling opportunities that are similar to those that previously produced failures (Denrell, 2003; Denrell and March, 2001).”
"In pursuit of the real deal": A longitudinal study of VC decision making (2011, background): “…or reliability (Levitt and March, 1988; Shepherd et al., 2003), which may be the result of an undersampling of failure (Levinthal and March, 1993; Denrell, 2003) that leads to increased confidence based upon those decisions that proved to be correct or successful rather than from a wider range…”
Vicarious Learning from the Failures and Near-Failures of Others: Evidence from the U.S. Commercial Banking Industry (2007, background): “Denrell (2003) similarly argued that organizations tend to undersample failure in vicarious learning because failed organizations are unavailable for observation, which may lead to a variety of false beliefs about effective management.”
What hampers innovation? Revealed barriers versus deterring barriers (2012, background): “This interpretation is confirmed by the evidence from another stream of literature in which a number of works examine firms’ experiential learning from their own (Miner et al., 1999; Haunschild and Sullivan, 2002; Denrell, 2003) and other organisations’ innovation failures (Kim and Miner, 2007; Baum”
Organizational Learning in Target Setting (2017, background): “Basedon this observation, researchers have argued for a better understanding of how experiential and vicarious learning interact (Denrell, 2003; Levinthal & March, 1993).”