Activating resilience: how persistent adversity drives entrepreneurial team adaptation

Purpose This study examines how entrepreneurial team resilience develops amid persistent adversity, focusing on mechanisms through which teams move between resilience states as the novelty, disruption and criticality of adversity change over time. Design/methodology/approach Guided by event system theory (EST), we conducted a qualitative study based on 62 retrospective interviews with members of 39 entrepreneurial teams in China. Respondents reconstructed their experiences across multiple phases of the three-year COVID-19 pandemic, enabling us to examine how resilience changed over time. Findings We find that resilience develops through a sequence of state transitions as the attributes of adversity change, with each transition linked to a distinct mechanism. From a latent state, high novelty and disruption prompt improvisational adaptation, leading to foundational resilience. Sustained disruption and rising criticality trigger relational and cognitive integration, which consolidates resilience. When adversity becomes highly critical, teams rely on shared vision to sustain commitment and redirect collective action (meaning-based adaptation). As adversity subsides, teams embed and recalibrate these capacities into a stronger latent resilience capacity than before the crisis. Originality/value This study explains how changes in the attributes of adversity prompt mechanisms that drive teams through successive resilience states. The process model highlights the transformed latent state, through which teams rebuild latent capacity at a higher level. We reframe team resilience as a cumulative, path-dependent process.