How Does Entrepreneurial Team Relational Governance Promote Social Start-Ups’ Organizational Resilience?

Why are some social entrepreneurial teams able to adapt to challenges and leverage the opportunities that are generated from a crisis, and why can some start-ups achieve sustained growth yet others do not? From the perspective of relational governance, this study unpacked the mechanism of how entrepreneurial teams promote social start-ups’ abilities to deal with crises and the mediating role of team learning through a survey of 396 social entrepreneurial team members. The results showed four key findings. (1) Trust among entrepreneurial team members has a positive effect on organizational resilience, whereas shared vision and communication-cooperation do not. (2) All the dimensions of relational governance positively promote team learning, and team learning is positively associated with organizational resilience. (3) Team learning mediates the effect of entrepreneurial team relational governance on organizational resilience; specifically, team learning plays a complete intermediary effect on shared vision and communication-cooperation to organizational resilience, whereas it plays a partial intermediary effect on trust in organizational resilience. (4) Team learning is the key factor to organizational resilience, whereas communication-cooperation promotes team learning the most. Practically, to strengthen social start-ups’ organizational resilience, entrepreneurial team members must first improve their understanding of environmental adaptability and then engage in productive and creative dialogues to manage issues, improve team members’ capability in information integration, as well as agree upon the action and activities that should be performed.