关键词: 人力资源管理, 晋升, 晋升失败, 晋升成功

Abstract: Human resources are the primary asset for enterprise development, and promotion is a key method to invigorate this resource. Promotion is critical for both organizations and employees. For organizations, decisions regarding promotion candidates affect the development of teams, departments, and the organization as a whole. For employees, promotion represents career success, indicating an increase in organizational status and salary. However, to increase internal competition, reduce the number of management positions, and control costs, organizations often offer limited promotion opportunities. This means that only a few employees can succeed, while the majority face promotion failure in promotional activities. Generally, promotion failure causes employees to miss their goals, hinders their development, and negatively impacts their psychological health and job performance. Specifically, behind each promoted employee, there are usually many unsuccessful candidates and ignoring this group can lead to reduced management efficiency, wasted resources, and loss of talent.
Despite its importance, academic and practical attention has historically focused more on promotion success, with interest in promotion failure emerging only in recent years. Overall, research indicates that employees who experience promotion failure exhibit various negative reactions. Although there have been some advances in the study of promotion failure, the research remains limited and fragmented, lacking coherent dialogue, which significantly hinders further research and practical application. Furthermore, existing studies primarily focus on employees’ negative reactions to promotion failure, lacking in-depth examination of the nature of these reactions, boundary conditions, and research topics, thus offering limited practical insights for promotion management.
Notably, a search for “promotion failure” in the CNKI database reveals that, to date, no research specifically addresses this issue in China. This indicates a severe disconnect between management practice and academic research on this common workplace phenomenon. To inspire future research and guide management practice, this paper aims to systematically review and synthesize existing studies and suggest future research directions. Specifically, this paper first reviews the emotional, cognitive, attitudinal, and behavioral responses of employees to promotion failure. Then, it identifies three theoretical mechanisms—fairness heuristic, cognitive appraisal, and frustration-aggression—that explain these responses. Furthermore, it identifies the individual and situational factors that moderate the effects of promotion failure. The paper concludes by analyzing the existing research gaps and suggesting several directions for future research. For example, from “whether” to “frequency” — optimizing the measurement methods of promotion failure; from “negative” to “positive” — enriching the nature of the impacts of promotion failure; from “employee” to “leader” — expanding the subjects of promotion failure research; and from “Western” to “local” — exploring the boundary conditions of the effects of promotion failure. Moreover, we have not only proposed these research directions but also presented practical and theoretically valuable propositions to guide future research, providing a clear pathway for subsequent studies to build on. This paper is the first comprehensive review of promotion failure and aims to support academic research and management practice in this area, bridging the gap between theory and practice.
To sum up, promotion failure is a significant source of stress for employees and is very common in organizations. Unfortunately, research on this topic is still shallow, and Chinese scholars have yet to pay sufficient attention to this phenomenon. This paper systematically integrates relevant studies to address questions such as how, why, and when employees react to promotion failure. By offering a comprehensive review, this paper aims to provide researchers with a thorough understanding of the literature on promotion failure, thus facilitating a quicker entry into the field. Additionally, it aims to help employees and organizations better understand and manage the common occurrence of promotion failure, providing scientific guidance and deep insights for future organizational stress management practices.

Key words: human resource management, promotion, promotion failure, promotion success