Job burnout and work engagement in entrepreneurs: How the psychological utility of entrepreneurship drives healthy engagement

Abstract

What is the real value of entrepreneurship? We propose a framework of psychological utility by integrating Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) theory with a recovery approach from a personal agency perspective. We hypothesize that personal agency together with the positive JD-R pattern of entrepreneurship generates outstanding psychological utility, which maintains and rewards a healthy, strong work engagement that spills over to off-work time. This benefits entrepreneurs, but also their businesses reliant on strong work engagement that avoids burnout. We validate our framework by means of panel data comprising four waves (348 entrepreneurs and 1002 employees), where we also analyze different types of entrepreneurs.