How do mental resilience strategies developed through competitive sports influence entrepreneurs’ financial decision-making and risk management under uncertainty?
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- Competitive sport, at its most demanding, is a school of decision-making under pressure. The present thesis explores whether and how resilience mechanisms developed in elite athletic careers can be transferred to entrepreneurial financial decision-making and risk management under uncertainty. The study applies the Gioia methodology to analyze data from six in-depth interviews with entrepreneur-athletes from different sporting backgrounds and venture contexts and identifies four aggregate dimensions of sports-derived resilience in entrepreneurial practice: regulatory stabilization under pressure, experiential transfer from sport to business, long-term strategic orientation, and, in four of the six cases, collective resilience architecture. The cross-case analysis also produces three descriptive profiles : the analytical reframer, the disciplined preparer and the strategic navigator. These profiles reflect the variation across the six cases in the transfer and mobilization of sporting resilience. These profiles constitute the study’s main empirical contribution, providing an initial structural framework to understand the encounter of athletic resilience with the specific pressures of entrepreneurial financial decision-making. A tentative gradient is also observed between competitive level and the extent of conscious articulation of the transfer, in line with the current literature on elite athlete metacognition, although the sample size does not permit any conclusive claim.