Abstract
This article adds to entrepreneurship research by detailing the mediating role of work-related emotional exhaustion in the connection between the extent to which women entrepreneurs experience work interference with family—defined as the degree to which the quality of their personal lives is compromised by work demands—and the performance of their businesses. It also predicts a buffering role of the entrepreneurial strategic posture of their businesses in this process. Survey data collected among women entrepreneurs in Chile indicate that the depletion of entrepreneurs’ work-related energy resource reservoirs is an important reason that increasing levels of work interference with family diminish business performance. This mediating role of emotional exhaustion is less prominent when they run their businesses entrepreneurially, which might help them find innovative solutions for the negative spillovers of work stress into the family domain. This research therefore reveals a critical challenge for women entrepreneurs who suffer in their personal lives due to pressing work demands: the associated emotional drainage compromises the success of their business endeavors, which eventually can generate even more hardships. This study also shows how women entrepreneurs can address this challenge, that is, by drawing from the novel insights that arise from an entrepreneurial strategic posture.
Highlights
Launching a new venture entails both benefits and challenges for people’s abilities to avoid conflict between their work and family roles
We propose that the hardships that women entrepreneurs experience at home due to pressing work demands could translate into diminished business performance, as informed by the extent to which they suffer from work-related emotional exhaustion (Jensen, 2014)
The mediating influence of emotional exhaustion on the link between work–family conflict and employees’ well-being and performance has been established (Bakker et al, 2004; Jensen and Knudsen, 2017). We extend these findings to an entrepreneurial context by hypothesizing: Hypothesis 3: Women entrepreneurs’ work-related emotional exhaustion mediates the relationship between the level of work interference with family that they experience and their business performance
Summary
Launching a new venture entails both benefits and challenges for people’s abilities to avoid conflict between their work and family roles. The responsibilities of being in charge of one’s own venture, instead of working for someone else, may significantly undermine the quality of family lives (Ezzedeen and Zikic, 2017); entrepreneurs tend to suffer more from work-to-family conflict, compared with their employed counterparts (Parasuraman and Simmers, 2001). Both men and women experience this challenge, but women entrepreneurs often do so to a greater extent As a pertinent challenge for women, prevailing societal norms often assign them primary responsibility, rather than men, to take care of their families, even potentially at the expense of their business endeavors (Hack-Polay et al, 2020; Kevill et al, 2020; Wyndow et al, 2013)
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