Drawing on the cognitive psychology of entrepreneurship, bounded rationality and role congruity perspectives, we investigate the moderating role of the assertiveness of women business owners in the ...relationship between their business performance and subsequent family-to-business instrumental support. Previous research has generally examined the family support women receive while running their businesses as an antecedent of firm performance. In this article, we reverse the order of these factors and investigate whether the past performance of a woman-led firm is a precursor of family support. Based on results of a longitudinal study of women business owners in Denmark, we found that the higher the assertiveness, the weaker the link between past performance and instrumental family support for businesses.
When entrepreneurs suffer from work-to-family conflict, it can affect firm performance. This article considers how emotional exhaustion experienced in the course of running a business mediates this ...link and how beliefs about competitive hostility invigorate that effect. Using survey data collected from 200 women entrepreneurs in Ethiopia, a country marked by culturally traditional gender role expectations, the empirical findings show that a sense of being emotionally overextended, due to the demands of running a firm, creates a conduit for the negative interference of the family upon the firm. This escalates into diminished firm performance. The results also demonstrate that this conduit is particularly prominent when entrepreneurs feel more threatened by hostile market environments. For entrepreneurship scholarship and practice, this article establishes two notable factors; a feeling of being ‘worn out’ by the business and adverse competitive markets. These factors clarify the complex link between work-induced family strain and business performance for women entrepreneurs, who might be particularly challenged when balancing time demands in gender-discriminatory environments.
Women-owned businesses represent a significant segment of the contemporary economy upon a global basis. However, women entrepreneurs still experience more obstacles than men depending on cultural ...context; for example, research on the Arab world concerning the interaction between women entrepreneurs and their families remains under-developed. Consequently, we ground our study upon an enhanced framework of agency theory, which includes family altruism. We examined the relationships between business-family interface (BFI) enrichment components and the performance of firms headed by female entrepreneurs women in Jordan and Sudan. Specifically, we investigated if and how the country level of political and social stability moderates these relationships. The findings suggest that the relationship between the family-related objective factor (family financial support) and the performance of firms headed by female entrepreneurs is not affected by the country’s political and social stability context. Conversely, the family-related subjective factor (family moral support) is affected by this context. Our study bridges the gap in contextual studies on the Arab world concerning the success of women-owned businesses and confirms how institutional elements affect business in addition to family-related matters. Implications for future research and public policy are discussed.
Women entrepreneurs add to the economic well-being of countries. This study examines whether stages of economic development (SEDs) influence women entrepreneurs similarly across national settings. ...This study approaches the environments in which women entrepreneurs launch their businesses from two perspectives – family support and personal problems – in Canada, China, Egypt, Morocco, Poland, South Korea, and Turkey. Findings show that the relationship between SEDs and family instrumental support (financial and organizational) presents an S shape, whereas that between SEDs and family moral support is an inverted S shape. Evidence confirms that the relationship between SEDs and personal problems follows an inverted U-shape, with personal problems increasing with SEDs to an optimal point, above or below which personal problems decrease. This study exemplifies the need for joined theory and practice to influence public policy worldwide. The results are useful for further developing policies to promote women-owned business startups by understanding what barriers women entrepreneurs face and what solutions work best with the stage of country development.
Extant literature looks at entrepreneurial exit strategies (e.g., stewardship—family succession; financial harvest—sale of the firm; and voluntary cessation—voluntary liquidation) from the limited ...perspectives of either a small business owner’s human capital or firm/environmental characteristics. Our study adds to this research by focusing on yet another crucial capital of a small business (family or non-family) owner—his or her social capital. Specifically, we investigate the role of social networks in shaping entrepreneurial exit strategies. We draw simultaneously upon the theory of planned behavior and two theoretical models. The first model conceptualizes that certain affect-related features of the assessment process, performed by a small business owner during subjective evaluation of his or her ownership stake, are predictors of what is known as socio-emotional wealth (SEW). The second model, on the other hand, develops theoretical connections between the SEW and the choice of an exit strategy. Thus, the two models have one common element, the SEW, which we use as a connector gluing the two perspectives into one coherent structure. We use a random sample of 302 firms operating in the European Union. We show that the relevance to small business owners and the size of their social networks are both strong predictors of entrepreneurial exit strategies.
This article adds to entrepreneurship research by detailing the mediating role of work-related emotional exhaustion in the connection between the extent to which women entrepreneurs experience work ...interference with family—defined as the degree to which the quality of their personal lives is compromised by work demands—and the performance of their businesses. It also predicts a buffering role of the entrepreneurial strategic posture of their businesses in this process. Survey data collected among women entrepreneurs in Chile indicate that the depletion of entrepreneurs’ work-related energy resource reservoirs is an important reason that increasing levels of work interference with family diminish business performance. This mediating role of emotional exhaustion is less prominent when they run their businesses entrepreneurially, which might help them find innovative solutions for the negative spillovers of work stress into the family domain. This research therefore reveals a critical challenge for women entrepreneurs who suffer in their personal lives due to pressing work demands: the associated emotional drainage compromises the success of their business endeavors, which eventually can generate even more hardships. This study also shows how women entrepreneurs can address this challenge, that is, by drawing from the novel insights that arise from an entrepreneurial strategic posture.
Countries vary widely and systematically in the extent to which the ambitions of their entrepreneurs differ from their realisations. We label this discrepancy entrepreneurial overconfidence (EOC). ...Although a certain level of EOC may be beneficial for an economy, we provide empirical support for the argument that if entrepreneurial ambitions substantially and systematically exceed realisations, this may be at the cost of economic and societal prosperity. Therefore, we need to know more about country levels of EOC and their determinants, particularly with respect to the growth-oriented segment of entrepreneurship. Combining data on entrepreneurial ambitions from Global Entrepreneurship Monitor and data on realisations from Eurostat, we construct a measure of EOC at the country level and correlate its variation across 23 European Union (EU) countries over the period 2004–2015 with a set of economic and cultural factors. Among other findings, our results show that ambitions exceed realisations in almost all countries, but that this discrepancy is significantly greater for new member countries entering the EU since 2004. Policy implications of our results are discussed, particularly for promoting ambitious entrepreneurship in countries at the intermediate development stage.
It is well documented that women entrepreneurs add exponential growth to the economic well-being of countries. The impact of family moral support on Turkish women entrepreneurs’ is examined including ...major challenges (i.e. personal problems and recognition of poor managerial skills and knowledge) and advantages (i.e. perceptions of helpfulness of education and work experience). Our findings show that family moral support can have both positive and negative impact on Turkish women entrepreneurs. Implications and future research are discussed.
Existen antecedentes teóricos que señalan que las mujeres emprendedoras tienen efecto en el bienestar económico de los países. El impacto del apoyo moral de la familia sobre las mujeres emprendedorares turcas analiza los principales retos (los problemas personales, habilidades directivas) y las ventajas (educación y experiencia en el trabajo). En nuestra investigación hemos encontrado que el apoyo moral de la familia puede tener ambos impactos, negativo y positivo en las mujeres emprendedoras turcas. Se analizan las implicaciones y las futuras investigaciones asociadas a este proceso.
The role of sustainable economies in the success of women-owned businesses across countries is under-researched. This study examines how country economic and political contexts are related to ...processes that occur in the work–life interface of women entrepreneurs. The research uses data from 10 countries chosen on the basis of multi-dimensional country context constructs (i.e., select economic and political factors). Work–life facets are measured by family instrumental and emotional support (enrichment dimension) and by work–family conflict and other personal problems (interference dimension). The results show that the likelihood of total family (instrumental and emotional) support decreases linearly as the country development level increases. By contrast, the country context is related to work–family conflict and related personal problems in an inverted U-shaped form. Conflict and problems are the highest in mid-level developed countries and lower in both low- and high-level developed economies.
This study examines the determinants of firm performance for women entrepreneurs in the context of an emerging economy affected by a turbulent political and socio-cultural environment. The study ...draws from the resource-based and institutional-based views embedded in the gender-aware 5M (money, management, market, macro/meso environments, and motherhood) model. A generalized structural equation model is used to analyze data from Egypt, the setting for this study. The study finds a positive relationship between women entrepreneurs' human capital and firm performance. However, no detectable relationship emerges between social capital and firm performance or between women's gender-related personal problems and firm performance. The findings suggest new boundary conditions in the domain of female entrepreneurship in a hostile environment, with important implications for practice and research.
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