Deconstructing the Black Box of Entrepreneurial Team Resilience Formation: A Multi-case Study from a Process Perspective

Abstract

Entrepreneurial teams frequently face adversity, yet their resilience outcomes vary from failure to recovery and even growth beyond recovery. While prior research views resilience as a process and highlights the role of team psychological resources, it remains unclear how team interactions generate such resources. Drawing on a multiple-case study of seven entrepreneurial teams that experienced major adversity during the COVID-19 period, we open the interaction-to-resource ‘black box’ from a process perspective. We identify four adversity-related interaction processes, including emotional management, conflict management, coordinated action, and learning & reflection, which generate three emergent states, namely collective positive emotion, collective sensemaking, and resourcefulness. These emergent states accumulate into a team psychological resource pool comprising emotional (team optimism), cognitive (team cognitive appraisal capability), and action (team creativity and adaptive persistence) resources. Cross-case comparison reveals three archetypal trajectories. Crucially, differences in resilience levels cannot be explained simply by greater resource stocks. Instead, they reflect process thresholds in interaction effectiveness and the depth of collective sensemaking. They hinge on the frequency, depth, and collectiveness of learning and reflection. High-quality learning & reflection help convert temporary gains into reusable routines. The study advances theory on entrepreneurial team resilience by specifying micro-to-meso mechanisms and offering a process-based explanation for heterogeneity in resilience outcomes.