New Ventures' Resilience to Adversity: Insights from Serial Attacks During the German Refugee Crisis

Adverse environmental events have the potential to negatively impact the functioning of new ventures and threaten their survival. We inductively explore how social ventures founded to help refugees built resilience during a series of four subsequent attacks allegedly committed by people who were disguised as refugees. Each of these attacks represented a potentially negative event for the ventures because it may diminish the commitment of the ventures’ internal and external resource providers. We found that after the attacks, the ventures perceived an environmental change, recognized its adversity in the form of a threat to the venture’s legitimacy, and developed doubt over their resource providers’ support. Subsequently, the ventures engaged the micro-processes of communicating with internal and external resource providers, motivating them, and enhancing their identification with the ventures’ mission and activities. As a result, the ventures were able to buffer a potentially negative impact of the current attack, but they were also prepared for the subsequent attacks. The result of our theorizing is a process model of how new ventures build resilience to a series of potentially adverse events. This model offers new insights for the literatures on organizational resilience and (social) entrepreneurship.