Entrepreneurs Create Businesses—and Meaning—for Life Satisfaction

Many entrepreneurs are motivated not simply by a desire to get rich but also by the wish to self-actualize by creating something meaningful. This idea is at the center of a new study by Al Berg Chair and Professor of Entrepreneurship Johan Wiklund and co-authors Nadav Shir, lecturer and senior researcher in the Faculty of Business Administration of Ono Academic College in Israel, and Srikant Manchiraju, associate professor at Florida State University’s Jim Moran College of Entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurial well-being—how people think and feel about their lives as entrepreneurs—has not received a lot of attention in research thus far, according to Wiklund. “But we argue that entrepreneurship is more than a job, that it’s a very big part of people’s identity,” he says. To measure how much individuals value their role as entrepreneurs, Wiklund and his colleagues introduce the concept of entrepreneurial life satisfaction (ELS).

Their paper, in the Journal of Business Ethics, shows that people who started a business out of their own desire (described as “volition”) rather than for such reasons as unemployment or lack of alternative opportunities, experience
entrepreneurship as a significant source of well-being. Volition in the early stages of starting a business is also associated with greater ELS later.

Wiklund was especially gratified to see these findings holding up in two different cultural settings. The researchers were drawing on two diverse sets of data—a cross-sectional study of American business owners as well as a longitudinal study of actively engaged Swedish entrepreneurs.

“I’m a little bit on a mission,” Wiklund says. “This paper is a building block in a greater focus on well-being. I think it’s important for entrepreneurship for a number of reasons. It’s a large motivator for people to engage in entrepreneurship in the first place, there’s a general interest in society in well-being, and we have a mental health crisis going on. So, sure, if you start a business, you have to make money. But that doesn’t mean it’s the only goal or even the most important one.”

Wiklund, J. (2024), Satisfaction with Life as an Entrepreneur: From Early Volition to Eudaimonia (with Shir, N. and Manchiraju, S.) Journal of Business Ethics.