Building resilience together in the face of adversity: A study of entrepreneurial teams
Jian Liu is a PhD student in the research group NIKOS Department for Entrepreneurship, Strategy, and Innovation Management. (Co)Promotors are dr. R. Harms from the Faculty of Behavioural, Management and Social Science, prof.dr.ir. P.C. de Weerd-Nederhof (Open University) and dr.ir. H. Shah-Zhou (University of Nottingham Ningbo China).
Entrepreneurs often face significant and unpredictable challenges—referred to in this dissertation as adversities. These can be abrupt shocks (e.g., natural disasters or sudden market crashes) or persistent strains (e.g., prolonged economic downturns or ongoing conflicts). Such adversities do not merely affect isolated individuals or larger organizations; instead, they pose systemic threats to entrepreneurial actors at multiple levels. To address these complexities, this dissertation investigates two overarching questions: (1) How does adversity rumination—the persistent focus on crisis-related thoughts—shape individuals’ entrepreneurial intentions? and (2) How do entrepreneurial teams develop and sustain resilience in response to abrupt and persistent adversities?
The dissertation is structured into four empirical and conceptual studies, each offering a distinct perspective on adversity in entrepreneurship. Chapter 2 introduces adversity rumination into the Theory of Planned Behavior, a widely used framework to explain entrepreneurial intentions, and applies both sufficiency- and necessity-based methods to examine these relationships. Using Ordinary Least Squares regression—a sufficiency-oriented analysis—it demonstrates that persistent reflection on adversity can, somewhat counterintuitively, stimulate rather than inhibit the formation of entrepreneurial intentions. This finding challenges the assumption that crises uniformly deter entrepreneurial aspirations. To deepen these insights, the study further employs Necessary Condition Analysis—a necessity-oriented approach—which shows that entrepreneurial attitude and self-efficacy become indispensable “must-have” factors when adversity rumination is high: in the absence of these constructs, individuals are unlikely to develop entrepreneurial intentions regardless of other favorable conditions. Subjective norms, in contrast, retain their necessity only for those who ruminate less intensely. Together, these sufficiency- and necessity-based findings reveal that both attitude and self-efficacy strongly drive entrepreneurial intentions on average, and they also represent unavoidably crucial conditions in higher-stress contexts, indicating that individuals who continuously contemplate adversity may be propelled toward entrepreneurship if, and only if, they possess robust personal convictions in their capability and a favorable attitude toward launching a venture.
Chapter 3 then broadens the scope by mapping the state of the literature on resilience in entrepreneurship using bibliometric and content analysis of 320 articles. This analysis reveals that resilience has been examined at individual, organizational, and ecosystem levels, but that a gap exists in understanding team-level resilience. The complexity of adversity is further underscored by the wide range of studies that vary in terms of the types of entrepreneurs, the nature of adversity, and the temporal phase of resilience processes. This literature review clarifies that resilience is far from monolithic; rather, it is shaped by both contextual dynamics and the heterogeneous actors involved.
Chapters 4 and 5 move the investigation to the team level, focusing on how entrepreneurial teams exhibit resilience when facing abrupt and persistent adversities. Chapter 4 employs a fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis of new venture teams to uncover multiple configurations—or “recipes”—that promote resilience in the face of sudden and disruptive challenges. These configurations vary in how they combine factors such as team improvisation, psychological safety, social capital, and shared mental models, indicating that there is no single path to successful recovery. Instead, different teams can reach similar resilient outcomes through distinct sets of conditions, underscoring the complexity and equifinality of team-level resilience mechanisms.
Chapter 5 shifts attention to persistent and long-lasting adversity that unfolds over an extended period. Drawing on event system theory and data from 21 entrepreneurial teams operating through three-year COVID-related adversity in China, the study traces the shifting patterns of team resilience over time. The findings demonstrate that team resilience is a dynamic process rather than a static attribute: teams initially rely on basic collaborative and improvisational strategies, then fortify their relationships and adopt shared mental models as adversity endures, and ultimately coalesce around a common vision to endure the most critical phases of prolonged adversity. By outlining how team cohesion, psychological safety, and shared purpose develop over iterative stages, Chapter 5 highlights a temporal dimension of resilience often overlooked in cross-sectional or short-term studies.
Taken together, these four chapters offer new insights into the interplay between adversity, entrepreneurship, and resilience at both individual and team levels. The research illuminates the paradox that adversity, while imposing substantial stress, can also act as a driver of entrepreneurial intentions when accompanied by strong internal motivations and a supportive social environment. It likewise underlines the significance of relational and cognitive processes in building collective resilience, especially within new venture teams that lack established corporate structures or resources. In doing so, this dissertation enriches theoretical models of entrepreneurial cognition by showing how adversity rumination recalibrates the role of core TPB constructs. It further advances resilience research by integrating configurational and process perspectives that capture the complexity and temporality of how entrepreneurial teams adapt, persevere, and sometimes thrive under conditions of abrupt or persistent adversity.
Short Version (for your information):
Entrepreneurship is full of ups and downs, especially for entrepreneurial teams. Those downs can sometimes feel like hitting rock bottom—whether it's an unexpected crisis like a pandemic or ongoing pressure from market instability. Many new ventures fail when the going gets tough, but some teams manage to stay afloat and even thrive. This research explores how entrepreneurial teams can build and maintain resilience, giving them the tools to bounce back from abrupt challenges and sustain themselves through persistent adversity. The project is structured around four studies: the first explores how adversity rumination impacts individual entrepreneurial intentions, while the second provides a systematic literature review on the intersection of resilience and entrepreneurship. The third study focuses on the resilience pathways of entrepreneurial teams responding to abrupt adversity, and the fourth examines how teams sustain resilience during persistent adversity. The findings contribute to a deeper understanding of the cognitive and collective mechanisms that enable entrepreneurial teams to adapt and thrive under varying conditions of adversity.
