When disappointment strikes, is your instinct to try to shake it off, forget about it and move on? My research and experience of many workplaces suggests this might be exactly the wrong response.
My interest in the science of disappointment began more than 15 years ago as a workplace consultant. I was struck by how often clients described episodes that left them feeling disappointed as deeply personal and unsettling experiences – and by how little research there was to help me respond meaningfully. That prompted me to do a PhD on the subject.
Disappointment often reflects a gap between expectation and reality. It can involve grieving a future we had already begun to live in our minds.
My subsequent research with colleagues revealed a telling pattern. In the workplace, disappointment is frequently generated at a systemic level by unrealistic targets – yet lands on individuals as a sense of personal failure.
In many walks of life, it is commonly dismissed as an unwanted and unhelpful emotion. But our research tells a different story. Disappointment can be an important fuel for creativity. It surfaces what we truly desire, clarifies what matters to us, and points us toward what we are not yet willing to accept.
Whether in our professional or personal lives, disappointment is a signal worth learning to read. Here are some ideas for when you next come up against it.
1. Don’t get ahead of yourself
When we are waiting on a significant decision – a job offer, test result or relationship turning point – our emotional response is prepared long before the answer arrives. The same outcome can feel entirely different depending on what we anticipated would happen. The wider the gap between expectation and reality, the greater the disappointment.
In the workplace, severe disappointment in not getting a job or missing out on a promotion can stem from the loss of a working future we had already begun to imagine. If that future does not materialise, we grieve it – even if it never fully existed.
2. Beware the success trap
Success can quietly raise the bar for future failure. One of our respondents illustrated this dynamic neatly. Exceed your work target by 10% one year, they observed, and your manager is unlikely to reward you with a lighter load the next. Rather, the target is raised again, making falling short more likely – and the disappointment more acute because of your past success.
The same pattern can play out in social situations. Think of a friend who often picks up the bill. Over time, a generous gesture becomes expected behaviour. Then, on the one occasion they don’t pay, this becomes a moment of disappointment that people notice and remember. That disappointment is not proportionate to what actually happened, but to the gap with what was expected.
Moritz Müller/Alamy
3. Try not to blame yourself (or anyone else)
People rarely experience disappointment in a neutral way. Rather, they tend to interpret it through one of two familiar patterns.
The first is internal: “I am the problem.” This assumes they did not try hard enough or were simply not good enough. Disappointment is treated as a sign they are a flawed or bad person.
The second interpretation is external. The fault is with others who did not recognise the person’s value and did not live up to expectations. The instinct is to blame and get angry with them.
Our research on disappointment in organisations shows both responses miss the point. Blaming ourselves or others can be a way of avoiding something harder to confront: that expectations are unrealistic or based on inaccurate assumptions.
4. The Ikea effect
Environments shape expectations. In workplaces, many people are encouraged to aim high and improve continuously. Organisations often promote ideals of progress, achievement and fulfilment.
These ideals can be motivating, but they can also create a perfect scenario that reality struggles to match. From this perspective, disappointment can be a structural feature of systems that rely on high expectations and idealised outcomes.
But there’s a personal aspect too. Research on what psychologists call “the Ikea effect” shows the more effort we invest in something, the more we value it – rather like a flatpack piece of furniture that we have built ourselves. At work, we routinely pour time, energy and identity into projects, roles and relationships. So, when things don’t go as hoped, we are losing something very personal.
And because failure at work is often witnessed by colleagues and managers, the stakes feel higher. The loss can become entangled with how others see us, and how we see ourselves.
Left unexamined, such feelings can calcify into something more damaging than the original disappointment: a diminished appetite for risk, a reluctance to invest fully in what comes next, and a growing suspicion that doing so is simply not worth it.
5. Be realistic, not idealistic
Moving from trying to eliminate disappointment to tolerating it can make it less destabilising and more informative. As a manager, this might mean developing the habit of noting, at the outset of a project, what a realistic rather than an ideal result would look like.
Similar patterns can appear in relationships too, where expecting things to feel perfect all the time can make an otherwise good relationship seem lacking.
Research consistently shows that naming difficult emotions reduces their intensity, and that workplaces where disappointment can be discussed honestly tend to be psychologically safer, more creative and better at learning from setbacks than those where such feelings are expected to be quietly moved past.
6. Accept disappointment, don’t dismiss it
Disappointment is uncomfortable because it confronts us with limits: to what we can control, to what organisations can deliver, or to what relationships can provide. An understandable instinct is to try to move past this quickly.
But a more constructive approach is to reflect on where our expectations come from, how they are formed, and whether they can be moderated in ways that benefit us. If disappointment is a signal that our expectations and reality are out of alignment, then understanding this may be one of the most important forms of resilience we can develop.
