A Fear of Failure Fallacy? How Team Innovation Beliefs and Performance Relate to Fear of Failure

Design project teams work together to create new ideas, products, and services. To encourage innovation, companies like Google, TATA, and P&G reward their teams’ failures. However, there is little empirical evidence for the principle that fearing failure is related to individuals’ or teams’ confidence in their ability to innovate or that fearing failure is directly related to innovative performance. To address this research gap, we measured fear of failure, innovation efficacy, and performance over the lifecycle of 114 design project teams. Interestingly, having higher fear of failure was not related to individual or team innovation efficacy as predicted. Fear of failure was related to overall performance for engineering trainee teams, however, it had no significant relationship with team ratings of innovation quality. These results support existing research that performance-avoid goal orientation, or fear of failure, is negatively related to sales performance (Porath & Bateman, 2006; Silver et al., 2006), academic performance (Elliot & Church, 1997), and work performance (Cellar et al., 2011), but may undermine commonly held assumptions about how a fear of failure relates to innovation. The findings should be of great interest to any organization that aims to innovate.