Resilience and Entrepreneurship, Aligning Theoretical and Methodological Approaches

Taking into account the most flattering studies, only 40% of new companies surpass the critical seven years of existence and just a 3% of startups go on to scale up. Nonetheless, 45.8% of all founders have failed at least once in the past, and therefore, they can be classified as serial entrepreneurs. The intriguing question arises why some persons pursue founding a company and, even further, why after a negative trial they challenge fate again? The answer is neither simple nor unidimensional. One of the many reasons why nascent entrepreneurs confront the high probability of failure and if failing face venture enterprise again lies in an inherent ability to manage adversity and to recover from setbacks: this is what we call the capability of resilience. We analyze the most relevant literature on entrepreneurial resilience, both from the perspective of individual psychology and from cognitive and behavioral approaches, in order to offer a comprehensive understanding of the human ability to cope with and overcome entrepreneurial failure. A meta-analysis of the different theories on resilience is conducted in order to identify the main academic discourses on entrepreneurial resilience. Additionally the different tests on resilience are categorized under the identified academic discourses; due to the understudied status of the topic, scholars illustrate a theory focused on resilience, but they use surveys designed to underpin other theoretical perspectives; consequently, the methodological tool applied does not always result in congruity with the postulated theories. Therefore, the main objective of this chapter is to establish an alignment between the diverse theoretical conceptions and the methodological approaches when enlightening the entrepreneurial resilience phenomenon.