LOCATION: SB1 5100(Corporate Partners Executive Boardroom)

TITLE: “Coping with a pandemic: Unpacking the underlying dynamics of entrepreneurs’ resilience”

TALK ABSTRACT: We develop a model of the longitudinal unfolding of entrepreneurs’ experience of distress and their subsequent mobilization of relevant coping strategies, which we test with a five-wave survey of 574 entrepreneurs at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. We theorize and show that the more emotionally-exhausted entrepreneurs are at the crisis’ beginning, the more uncertainty they later perceive about their resources, and the more this hinders their subsequent mobilization of relevant coping strategies – namely, environmental scanning and reflexivity. In turn, we theorize and show that for environmental scanning to reap benefits in terms of reduced perceived uncertainty and emotional exhaustion, it must be accompanied by deliberate efforts in reflexivity. All in all, our work contributes new insights about the underlying psychological dynamics that explain the mobilization of relevant coping strategies – and of the effects these can have for becoming resilient.

SPEAKER BIO: Jean-François Harvey is an associate professor in the Department of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at HEC Montréal. His research focuses on how individuals, teams, and organizations learn and adapt, especially in uncertain and ambiguous contexts. His work has appeared in scholarly journals such as Academy of Management Annals and Human Relations, and his book (with Amy Edmondson), Extreme Teaming, reports the findings of a multiple case study on this topic. Harvey received his Ph.D. from HEC Montréal, was a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, and completed a two-year postdoc at Harvard Business School.