By: Martin Schwarz, Alexandra Jussli
Self-affirmation interventions (SAIs) have garnered increasing interest from both practitioners and scholars due to their potential to help working adults cope with uncertainty and job insecurity. This interest is particularly relevant for entrepreneurs, who frequently face high levels of uncertainty and lack the organizational support structures. Despite this growing attention, the underlying mechanisms through which SAIs affect coping with insecurities remain largely unexplored, as most research uses experimental settings and does not account for individuals' responses. This study follows the effectuation logic to examine how entrepreneurs perceive targeted SAIs and how these interventions support coping with entrepreneurial insecurity. We employed a qualitative research design, combining data from a two-month targeted SAI with multiple sources, including diaries, interviews, and observations, as well as a written Delphi survey. In total, we analyzed data from 23 entrepreneurs and 12 coaching experts. Our findings suggest a process model in which targeted SAIs facilitate cognitive job crafting, enhance psychological capital, and foster task, social, and affordance crafting. Additionally, mindfulness and psychological safety emerged as key contextual factors influencing the effectiveness of SAIs in the intervention design. At the same time, economic stress was found to mitigate the beneficial impact of these factors. These findings offer valuable insights into individual-level strategies for supporting entrepreneurs' effectuation-oriented coping mechanisms. Future research should build on these insights by empirically testing the identified concepts and relationships.
