Psychosocial Wellbeing of Entrepreneurs: The Interplay of Business-Family Life Stressors and Social Support

Prologue

Rosetta is a hardworking entrepreneur that has led her social enterprise organisation for over six years. She has two children living with disabilities. She loves collaborating with people to solve challenging community problems and derives satisfaction when she accomplishes such challenging feats. She draws strength from making progress on such challenging tasks and demonstrates her best abilities during such occasions. In 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic struck with unprecedented challenges. The virus and its accompanying regulations of lockdown, social distancing, mask-wearing, and hand sanitisation brought tremendous stress on communities. Rosetta closed her office and asked her employees to go home and work remotely since the government had instructed that people obey the Covid-19 regulations. Nations waited for vaccination for several months as families were being devastated from loss of members, uncertain fears, sicknesses, and loss of income in most cases. Small businesses including Rosetta’s suffered unprintable hardships ranging from loss of sponsors to loss of income leading to inability to pay bills.

As Rosetta watched her business, employees and the larger community suffer, all she could think of was how to help. For days and nights, she immersed herself in fruitless thoughts. When the government rolled out the COVID -19 vaccines, she worried about vaccination hesitations, and what to do to make vaccines available and acceptable to her community. For whole evenings including supper time and when in bed trying to fall asleep, she pondered on the challenges and how to solve them. She found herself feeling drained, tired, and in bad spirits every waking morning. Although those were not the first times that she found herself in similar mind situations, as she recalled the year before Covid-10 when she needed to convince a certain funder to extend the contractual period. She tried to piece all her documents and evidence together to convince her funder about the need to go on, but her laptop crashed two days to her meeting. Rosetta was so worried about completing the report and making a convincing presentation to the funder that she was absent minded throughout her daughter’s choral evening. The cycle of worry, lack of appetite, sleeplessness, kicked in and she found herself grumpy, in bad moods, and drained through the next two days.

Members of her family, on seeing the challenges Rosetta faced and the effect on her wellbeing, decided to provide some of the funding needs of her enterprise. This somehow complicated her anxiety, uncertainty, and fear with respect to the result that accepting the family’s financial resource would cause her enterprise. Torn between options, Rosetta decided to seek out a psychotherapist for professional assistance.

According to Wiklund, Nikolaev, Shir, Foo, and Bradley (2019), the well-being of entrepreneurs is gaining rising interest because of its linkage to meaningful results like organisational performance (Stephan, 2018) and satisfaction (Wach, Stephan, & Georgievski, 2016). Unarguably, the line between the entrepreneurs and their companies cannot be clear, it is difficult for entrepreneurs to separate themselves physically and mentally from their companies. Therefore, this chapter also examines the way in which entrepreneurs detach and recover from their work and family stressors to maintain their well-being using Sonnentag and Fritz’s (2015) stressor-detachment framework. The model suggests that entrepreneurs, by removing themselves mentally from their business when business time is over, plus, not giving thought to work in the evenings, reduce stress.