Aspirations, Behaviors and Commitments: Social Identity and Entrepreneurial Resilience

Abstract

We explore how thirteen entrepreneurial firms in the southeast textile industry responded to the combination of competitive blows and the global economic crisis. Existing explanations of organizational resilience rely on slack resources; however, the firms we studied operated under conditions of negative slack. We discovered that individual-level entrepreneurial identity plays a pivotal role in shaping organization-level resilience. We induce a process model that explains how three types of identity map to three forms of resilience. Our contributions extend and complement theories of resilience, challenge current assumptions of what it means to be an entrepreneur and demand integration of competing schools of social psychology.