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The Life Satisfaction of Owner-Manager Entrepreneurs When the Business of Business is not only Business

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Abstract

This paper studies the anatomy of entrepreneurs’ satisfaction with life, which refers to the relationship between life satisfaction, satisfaction in domains of life, and affective, evaluative, and sensory experiences of being well. The paper focuses on owner-manager entrepreneurs, who, as managers, lead their firms and take major business decisions and, as owners, have room to deviate from the exclusive procurement of profits to pursue their happiness. The study of entrepreneurs’ anatomy of life satisfaction provides insight on how they lead their firms and how they weight the well-being repercussions of their business decisions. The paper distinguishes between family-firm and nonfamily-firm entrepreneurs, and it shows that there is heterogeneity in entrepreneurs’ anatomy of life satisfaction; with the life satisfaction of family-firm entrepreneurs being strongly driven by family satisfaction and by negative affect, while the life satisfaction of nonfamily-firm entrepreneurs is strongly driven by work satisfaction. These differences in the anatomy of entrepreneurs’ life satisfaction do correspond with observed differences in the organization and behavior of family and nonfamily firms, which suggests that the anatomy of life satisfaction provides insight on how entrepreneurs weight their business decisions and lead their firms. The empirical exercise is based on an original survey applied to Spanish entrepreneurs in 2019.

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Notes

  1. The survey did not gather firm-level information. The SABI 2018 database provides complementary firm-level information which can be matched to the survey information; unfortunately, this information is not available for all entrepreneurs in the survey (only for 145 observations). Based on this firm-level data, it is observed that, on average, owner-managers in family firms in the survey lead firms with an average of 15 employees, an economic return of 4.27 percent, and 1,990,000 euros in assets; while owner-managers in small nonfamily firms in the survey lead firms with an average of 10 employees, an economic return of 4.26 percent, and 845,000 euros in assets.

  2. This approach is not free of limitations (see OECD 2013, pp. 74 and 88); it is expected for circumstantial events that affected entrepreneurs’ emotional state the previous day to be sufficiently random as to wash out any potential bias. In addition, it is important to emphasize that this paper is dealing with the relationship between affective experiences and satisfaction in domains of life, and not with the study of affective levels. Thus, general events that impact on family and nonfamily-firm entrepreneurs during the previous day may not pose a major risk to the main findings on the nature of the relationship across family and nonfamily-firm entrepreneurs.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universidad Internacional de La Rioja, Madrid, Spain

    Mariano Rojas & Karen Watkins-Fassler

  2. Universidad de Granada, Granada, Spain

    Lázaro Rodríguez-Ariza

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  1. Mariano Rojas
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  2. Karen Watkins-Fassler
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  3. Lázaro Rodríguez-Ariza
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Contributions

Mariano Rojas: data handling and econometric analysis, writing -original draft, subjective well-being insight and subjective well-being literature review.

Karen Watkins-Fassler: family-business insight and family-business literature review, data handling, writing -review and editing.

Lázaro Rodríguez-Ariza: Survey implementation, entrepreneurship insight and entrepreneurship literature review.

All authors have contributed to the conceptualization of the study.

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Correspondence to Mariano Rojas.

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Rojas, M., Watkins-Fassler, K. & Rodríguez-Ariza, L. The Life Satisfaction of Owner-Manager Entrepreneurs When the Business of Business is not only Business. Applied Research Quality Life 17, 2251–2275 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11482-022-10035-1

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