Dealing with Failure

So for this blog, I decided to discuss the Harvard Business Review article about handling failure in the workplace.  In today’s fast-paced world, failure is bound to happen to everyone at some point.  I don't know about you, but I have never met a perfect person who has never failed at anything.  In summary, this article breaks humans down into three main categories, based on how they handle failure.  The first category is extrapunitive, where individuals can be found blaming others for their failure.  For example, if a partner of an accounting firm takes a vacation during busy season, and does not complete his client's audit on time, he may blame his staff accountants for the failure.  The second category is those who are intropunitive, who blame themselves for their failures.  The final category is impunitive, who just denies the blame all together.  The three categories are then broken down into subcategories, but I won't bore you with those details as you have most likely already read the article and are perfectly aware of what they are.

Let me first start off by saying that I like how the article gives tips on how to better cope with failure.  I think they are very useful in helping an individual improve their personality.  I also like how they developed the categories of how people react (which I mentioned in the first paragraph).  Also, I think it is important that individuals be aware of which category they fall into, because it might not be the one they think they should be in.

I chose to blog about this article because I wanted to quickly relate it to my psychology class from last semester.  Last spring, we took a personality test that identified what kind of locust of control we possessed.  With this test, one could receive either an internal locust of control, meaning they take responsibility for their own actions, or an external locust, meaning  they do not take responsibility for the outcome of their actions.  I took this test, and my results showed I had an internal locust of control, which I found very accurate because I do not usually blame others for my own failures.  I think this relates to the failure article we had to read because how individuals react to failure, as represented by the three categories in the article, is a direct representation of their locust of control.   The extrapunitive and impunitive categories would have external locusts of control, because they either blame others, or deny blame completely.  The intropunitive category would have an internal locust of control, because they end up blaming themselves for their failures.

Well that's it for this blog.  Once again, I hope you enjoyed it.  If you were in the honors psychology with me last spring, I hope I didn't bring up any bad memories!