The Life Satisfaction of Owner-Manager Entrepreneurs. When the business of business is not only business

Abstract

This paper studies the anatomy of entrepreneurs’ satisfaction with life, which refers to the relationship between life satisfaction, satisfaction in domains of life, and afective, evaluative, and sensory experiences of being well. The paper focuses on owner-manager entrepreneurs, who, as managers, lead their frms and take major business decisions and, as owners, have room to deviate from the exclusive procurement of profts to pursue their happiness. The study of entrepreneurs’ anatomy of life satisfaction provides insight on how they lead their frms and how they weight the well-being repercussions of their business decisions. The paper distinguishes between family-frm and nonfamily-frm entrepreneurs, and it shows that there is heterogeneity in entrepreneurs’ anatomy of life satisfaction; with the life satisfaction of family-frm entrepreneurs being strongly driven by family satisfaction and by negative afect, while the life satisfaction of nonfamily-frm entrepreneurs is strongly driven by work satisfaction. These diferences in the anatomy of entrepreneurs’ life satisfaction do correspond with observed diferences in the organization and behavior of family and nonfamily frms, which suggests that the anatomy of life satisfaction provides insight on how entrepreneurs weight their business decisions and lead their frms. The empirical exercise is based on an original survey applied to Spanish entrepreneurs in 2019.