Abstract
This chapter includes a comprehensive literature review. Several studies discussing work-life issues among entrepreneurs are presented. Next, the literature on work-life balance in the specific context of women’s entrepreneurship is reviewed. The chapter identifies articles from scientific journals that are of high relevance to the underlying research topic and provide important insights for the subsequent research steps in this work. Finally, the key insights from the literature review are summarized.
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Notes
- 1.
The articles underlying both literature reviews were primarily extracted from the Web of Science™ Core Collection database as well as Google Scholar.
- 2.
- 3.
For a detailed discussion of growth-facilitating and growth-constraining strategies for managing the work-family interface, see Jennings and McDougald (2007, p. 753 ff.).
- 4.
König and Cesinger (2015, p. 537) eliminated individuals who were not living in a partnership with children in their sample.
- 5.
Author’s own formatting.
- 6.
In particular, Sect. 4.3.2.1 will discuss the impact of homeworking on the work-life balance of women entrepreneurs.
- 7.
The results by Kirkwood and Tootell (2008, p. 292) indicate no evidence of any of the male participants experiencing any form of work-family conflict. The focus of this article is on the experiences and strategies of women entrepreneurs. Therefore, the article is presented in this section on work-life-balance in the context of women’s entrepreneurship.
- 8.
Shelton (2006, p. 290) described the following three work-family management strategies: role elimination, role reduction and role sharing.
- 9.
Rehman and Azam Roomi (2012, p. 214) use a sample of 20 women entrepreneurs who own (100% of their business) and manage their business for at least 3 years and have responsibilities toward family. Nearly all participants are married and have children, and most of the entrepreneurs (70%) are in the age range of 30–40 years (Rehman & Azam Roomi, 2012, p. 214).
- 10.
Agarwal and Lenka (2015, p. 357) define work-life balance as follows: “Work-life balance means maintaining balance between work and life style of an individual.”
- 11.
Section 5.2 formulates such strategies, which can improve women entrepreneurs’ work-life balance, based on an interview study with experts in the field of women’s entrepreneurship from science and practice.
- 12.
As mentioned previously, the results by Kirkwood and Tootell (2008, p. 292) indicated no evidence of any of the male participants experiencing any form of work-family conflict. The focus of this article was on the experiences and strategies of women entrepreneurs. Thus, the article was presented in the previous section on work-life-balance in the context of women’s entrepreneurship.
- 13.
Stoner et al. (1990) used the term ‘work-home role conflict’ in their article.
- 14.
- 15.
In particular, Sect. 4.3.2.5 will shed light on the importance of support from different sources for women entrepreneurs’ work-life balance.
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Zerwas, C.S. (2019). Research on Women Entrepreneurs’ Work-Life Balance. In: Work-Life Balance and Women's Entrepreneurship. Contributions to Management Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29804-3_3
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