Entrepreneurship and Subjective Well-Being: The Mediating Role of Psychological Functioning

By Boris N. Nikolaev, C. Boudreaux, Matthew S. Wood. Entrepreneurship: Theory & Practice, 2019

183 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Well-being is an essential outcome of engagement in entrepreneurship, but the pathway from self-employment to well-being is poorly understood. To address this, we develop a model in which psychological functioning—purposeful engagement with life, realization of personal talents and capabilities, and fulfillment of intrinsic needs such as autonomy and competence—mediates the relationship between entrepreneurship and subjective well-being. We test our model with data from the European Social Survey using structural equation modeling and a series of robustness tests (e.g., propensity score matching estimators and accounting for model uncertainty). Results suggest that entrepreneurship is associated with substantial benefits in terms of psychological functioning—both personal and social—which almost entirely mediate the relationship between entrepreneurship and subjective well-being. These findings highlight psychological functioning as a critical pathway between entrepreneurship and subjective well-being.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7e29b164b4f7bc5af93301b01b98bcac3ecdfb43

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In Management of Technology and Innovation

  1. Nadav Shir
  2. C. Ryff

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

  1. Nadav Shir
  2. C. Ryff

In Social Psychology

  1. Nadav Shir
  2. C. Ryff
  3. A. Waterman
  4. Corey Keyes
  5. T. Kashdan
  6. Mohsen Joshanloo
  7. M. Steger
  8. Cynthia Fisher

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