Entrepreneurship and well-being: The role of psychological autonomy, competence, and relatedness

By Nadav Shir, Boris N. Nikolaev, Joakim Wincent. Journal of Business Venturing, 2019

355 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Drawing upon the self-determination theory, we develop a two-stage multi-path mediation model in which psychological autonomy mediates the relationship between active engagement in entrepreneurship and well-being partially through its effect on psychological competence and relatedness. We test this model on a representative sample of 1837 working individuals (251 early-stage entrepreneurs) from Sweden. We find active engagement in entrepreneurial work tasks to be strongly associated with well-being relative to non-entrepreneurial work. Thus, we highlight the importance of individual self-organization—with autonomy at its core—which makes entrepreneurial work more beneficial in terms of basic psychological needs compared to other work alternatives.

Subfields: Management of Technology and Innovation, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/75e82c5cfa0d75e5b707874779a7472b95ddde56

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In Management of Technology and Innovation

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

In Social Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Dispositional Positive and Negative Affect and Self-Employment Transitions: The Mediating Role of Job Satisfaction (2019, background): “…(Ryan & Deci, 2017) and because we believe that entrepreneurship offers unique opportunities for people to thrive and amend their mental health (e.g., Shir et al., 2019; Williams & Shepherd, 2016), we maintain that dispositional affect strongly motivates the decision to enter self-employment.”
Entrepreneurship, Self-Organization, and Eudaimonic Well-Being: A Dynamic Approach (2021, background): “Our view also complements recent studies based on the self- determination theory (e.g., Benz & Frey, 2008; Shir et al., 2019; Stephan et al., 2020), which also emphasized the self- organizational benefits of entrepreneurship.”
Let’s Focus on Solutions to Entrepreneurial Ill-Being! Recovery Interventions to Enhance Entrepreneurial Well-Being (2021, background): “, autonomy, meaningfulness, and personal identification), are generally recognized for the positive influence they have on entrepreneurial wellbeing (Shir et al., 2019).”
Entrepreneurship and Subjective Well-Being: The Mediating Role of Psychological Functioning (2019, background): “Previous studies, for example, suggest that self-employed people (relative to organizational workers) are more likely to report a higher sense of psychological relatedness—having more social contacts and close friends who care about their lives and getting along with the people around them (Shir et ”
The Effects of Financial Literacy on Sustainable Entrepreneurship (2021, background): “More recently, however, scholars have pointed out the positive effect between entrepreneurial initiative and social wellbeing [6].”