An Entrepreneurial Well-being Model based on GEM Data for Spain

Abstract

The Economics of Happiness is one of the research areas of greatest growth in recent years. Throughout this work, a venture based model in which satisfaction of Spanish entrepreneurs with their professional life is performed. We analyze the responses of 9,989 entrepreneurs using data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), and six hypothesis are discussed. The results show that, for the Spanish case, there is a strong consistency in the results the opportunity entrepreneurs present greater satisfaction than necessity entrepreneurs.

Considering Education for Opportunity versus Necessity-based Entrepreneurs: Does Income Lead to Greater Entrepreneurial Well-Being

“…It turns out that the first group of individuals that are commonly referred to as opportunity entrepreneurs have higher well-being than the second group of so called necessity entrepreneurs. While opportunity entrepreneurs are found to have higher preference for self-employment (Bhola, Verheul, Thurik, & Grilo, 2006;Block & Koellinger, 2009), they also attain higher satisfaction with work based on various contexts such as GEM's data on Spanish entrepreneurs (Sáiz-Álvarez et al, 2014) or German nascent entrepreneurs (Block & Koellinger, 2009).…”

“…However, there is still a need to conceptualize the well-being of an entrepreneur as well-being of entrepreneurs may differ significantly from other waged employed individuals even based on a more objective evaluation of happiness such as wealth, income, or educational attainments. While well-being of entrepreneurs is measured frequently as subjective well-being in many studies (Carree & Verheul, 2012;Sáiz-Álvarez et al, 2014;Shir, 2015), entrepreneurial well-being is a new notion conceptualized recently by Shir (2015) as composed of four different components. According to Shir (2015), these components are general life satisfaction as an entrepreneur, satisfaction in entrepreneurial domains such as business profit, business growth or work-life balance, and positive and negative experiences related to entrepreneurship.…”

“…This study uses the GEM data on well-being and other several aspects of entrepreneurs from all over the world. In GEM methodology, well-being is measured through items of work satisfaction and affect (Sáiz-Álvarez et al, 2014) reflecting some dimensions of subjective well-being conceptualized by Shir (2015).…”

“…The increasing startup activities across the world resulted in an ever growing body of research on entrepreneurial well-being (Cooper & Artz, 1995;Morris, Kuratko, Schindehutte, & Spivack, 2012;Sáiz-Álvarez, Corduras Martínez, & Cuervo-Arango Martínez, 2014;Shir, 2015). Entrepreneurial well-being is typically measured in terms of general life satisfaction and satisfaction in entrepreneurial domains such as business growth, and work-life balance (Shir, 2015).…”

“…or well-being (satisfaction with life or work-life balance), the majority of empirical research, though scarce, highlight entrepreneurs with opportunity motives tend to gain higher entrepreneurial satisfaction than the ones with necessity motives (Arkali Olcay & Kunday, 2016;Binder & Coad, 2013;Block & Koellinger, 2009;Kautonen & Palmroos, 2010;Sáiz-Álvarez et al, 2014). Discovering or creating opportunities to start new ventures rather than being pushed into self-employment because of necessities is shown to play a central role in entrepreneurial well-being as is addressed by the prior literature.…”