ABOUT THE RESEARCH

After 18 months, we found mismatches between expectations and experiences at three levels—purpose, autonomy, and achievement—which surface as business owners reflect on execution, performance, and fulfilment experiences.

So, it is not the stressful experiences or heavy workload themselves that trigger negative emotions, rather it is the compounding of incongruences between expectations of ideal states and actual experiences at the level of purpose, autonomy, and achievement.

Tackling issues of self-worth in new business creation is extremely important, because its deterioration has implications not only for their psychological functioning, but for the performance of the business. New business owners with diminished self-worth engage in rumination, frequently criticizing themselves and their abilities. They rarely welcome compliments and tend to focus on mistakes, leading to negative judgments and overly critical evaluations of their performance, and their value as business owners and human beings.

Existing support programmes are ill-equipped to tackle these problems, as they tend to focus on self-confidence and self-esteem.

Our MYB programmes help business owners navigate through these incongruences and their effects and equip them with tools to rethink their businesses. We help them form more positive and stable conceptualizations of themselves and rebuild their businesses around them. Mixing wellbeing and business performance is now possible.

Our research was funded by UKRI and received the 2023 Best paper award for Excellence in Research on the General Topic in Entrepreneurship, presented by the National Federation of Independent Business in the USA.