BUSINESS FAILURES

Business Failures



Business Failures

Introduction

In an era characterized by the widespread availability and accessibility of information and growing concerns over ethical and “authentic” leadership, business leaders are increasingly required to answer to public concerns about their past and present failures.

Failure in the existing scholarly literature is largely confined to quantifiable measures of poor performance of a leader's direct actions. This article offers a more elaborate typology of leaders' failures and the framing strategies regularly employed by leaders, based on a discourse analysis of media texts. The author presents a framework through which the ways in which leaders actively construct and negotiate images of leadership style, effectiveness, and authenticity can be systematically explored.

Companies Failure

Leaders as Failure Framers

In the past decade, there has been growing interest in conceptualizing and promoting “authentic” leadership. This interest in authenticity has been attributed to the mounting ethical pressures in the business environment that have arisen, particularly in the United States, in the post-9/11 climate, where security and confidence in institutions and their leaders have become of greater priority to the public. In light of the widespread availability and accessibility of information and growing concerns over ethical leadership in the current business environment, it is expected that leaders will be required to answer more fully to public concerns over past and present transgressions through the public press. Authentic leadership has been promoted as the most viable and morally correct response to these public concerns. Indeed, several core processes that have in the past been associated with transformational leadership, such as impression management, have started to be viewed less positively. (Castrogiovannim, 2003)

Similarly, admitting to mistakes and thereby divulging weaknesses can work to enhance a leader's accessibility, even build solidarity with her or his followers; this is especially effective as a strategy when they appear to triumph in the face of adversity. Repenting past mistakes fulfills two aspects of transformational leadership: idealized influence, by emphasizing the importance of behaving ethically and taking responsibility for one's actions by example, and individualized consideration, by focusing on the needs of their followers as apologies have the potential to demonstrate caring for the employee. In addition, some studies have suggested that demonstrating the courage to fail can enhance a leader's ability to lead change.

Management Failures

As analysis of the collected data began, it became apparent that the failures of a leader included several types beyond those that had been previously noted, for instance, the missteps made by those close to the leader that have confounded with the leader's own failures. The processes of data collection and analysis hence became iterative, where the collected data were frequently augmented to encompass new understandings of failure and failure framing. The resulting data set comprised both excerpts and full-length articles from all relevant media publications before, during, and after the significant failures faced by the leaders. The data analysis involved a content analysis that sought not only to categorize the type of mistakes involved but also to highlight the impression management techniques and rhetorical devices ...