What subdues shame in learning from failure? Empirical study on a company in Japan

Many companies have been suffering from learning from failure even though they understand its importance and make effort to do it. We, in this paper, introduce an engineering company in Japan, which have succeeded in establishing their way to learning from failure and executing it. They have accumulated 41 failure cases since 2005, and they have never had the same failures which they reviewed through their learning system. And they have kept growing and good business performance with their knowledge management activities, including their learning from failure. We conducted an empirical research on the company, focusing on subduing shame toward their learning from failure. First, we generated three hypotheses related to relationship among intention to participate, individual growth and shame. Second, we collected quantitative data on their learning from failure in this company through questionnaire survey. And we analysed the data with covariance structure analysis with analytical computer software to verify the hypotheses. We found that "intention to participate" was more effective than "individual growth" to subdue "shame" toward their learning from failure in the company.