City Research Online

Abstract

Entrepreneurs’ mental well-being has increasingly captured the attention of both scholars and the broader public. Building on self-efficacy theory and conservation of resources (COR) theory, we examine how entrepreneurs’ mental well-being influences their income. We theorize that while mental well-being positively influences entrepreneurial income, this baseline relationship is moderated by the external objective resources entrepreneurs access through their social contexts. Using a rich longitudinal dataset of 1,013 entrepreneurs in Germany between 2002 and 2015, we find that entrepreneurs’ mental well-being is positively associated with their income. This relationship is weaker for entrepreneurs with access to external objective resources, specifically those with a high-earning spouse or prior state support, and stronger for those who have experienced resource loss through divorce. We also complement our analysis of the archival database with a randomized online experiment to test our underlying argument for the interaction effect between mental well-being and external objective resources on self-efficacy. Our findings offer new insights into how entrepreneurs’ mental well-being, COR, and self-efficacy jointly shape their work-related outcomes.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2026 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
Publisher Keywords:	Entrepreneurial well-being; conservation of resources; entrepreneurial income; selfefficacy; external objective resources; social contexts
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor > HD28 Management. Industrial Management H Social Sciences > HM Sociology R Medicine > RC Internal medicine > RC0321 Neuroscience. Biological psychiatry. Neuropsychiatry
Departments:	Bayes Business School Bayes Business School > Faculty of Management
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

Export

Downloads