What we talk about when we talk about entrepreneurship and stress : Essays on entrepreneurial stress
Year: 2023
Type: dissertation
Abstract: With this dissertation, I aim to answer the question, ‘How does the interaction between an entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, and the environment lead to stress?’ Drawing on the transactional theory of stress, I argue that to better understand entrepreneurial stress we should study entrepreneurs’ appraisals of stressful events, resulting from the transaction between entrepreneurs and their environment and which can pose a threat or a challenge and cause harm. I further argue that an entrepreneur’s traits, beliefs, and values play a primary role in how that entrepreneur experiences and responds to stress. These arguments are developed over the course of the three essays comprising this dissertation. Essay 1 synthesizes and organizes empirical evidence from extant research to lay the theoretical groundwork for the subsequent research conducted in Essays 2 and 3. A systematic literature review reveals the factors of entrepreneurship that can generate stress and those factors that moderate or mediate entrepreneurial stress. Essay 2 unveils how an entrepreneur’s traits, values, and beliefs can expose an entrepreneur to extreme stress. The essay’s findings suggest that entrepreneurial stress might take the form of a spiral process, which starts with an appraisal of a stressful encounter as a challenge and resolves with an appraisal of the encounter as harmful. Moreover, the essay reveals that an entrepreneur’s autonomy, job demands, and traits of optimism and self-efficacy play a defining role in stress experience. Essay 3 questions how an entrepreneur’s perception of stress translates into distinctly different forms of stress experience. The essay employs a phenomenographic approach to explore the different behavioural patterns entrepreneurs exhibit when encountering stress. Overall, in this thesis I make several contributions to research on entrepreneurial stress by (1) demonstrating how entrepreneurs’ characteristics, values, and beliefs define their stress experience; (2) presenting an alternative perspective on the causes of entrepreneurial stress; and (3) illuminating how the transaction between an entrepreneur and an environment translates into entrepreneurial stress.
Source: Osuva (University of Vaasa)
Author: Pak, Yekaterina
Language: English
Subfield: Management of Technology and Innovation
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7072332341