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3269Besides focusing on objective output such as entrepreneurial performance, it is more urgent and necessary to attach importance to subjective utility such as entrepreneurial well-being. The existing studies pay more attention to individual factors that affect entrepreneurial well-being and relatively ignore the impact of social environment. As an essential social environmental factor, social support greatly affects entrepreneurial well-being, especially in the Chinese context where “strong relationships” such as friends, relatives, and partners are more valued. Thus, this paper discusses the influencing mechanism of social support and entrepreneurial self-efficacy on entrepreneurial well-being based on the social support theory and the social cognition theory. It deeply reveals the formation mechanism of entrepreneurial well-being by combining social environment and individual factors.
This paper conducts a questionnaire survey to collect data, which targets entrepreneurs in different regions of China. After formal investigation and sample selection, a total of 323 useable samples are finally obtained. The theoretical assumptions are empirically tested by correlation analysis, hierarchy regression analysis, and Bootstrap. Also, the robustness of the results is tested. The results show that: (1) Social support can improve entrepreneurial well-being. (2) Entrepreneurial self-efficacy and entrepreneurial performance are the critical paths for social support to improve entrepreneurial well-being. (3) Social support improves entrepreneurial performance by enhancing entrepreneurial self-efficacy, and further positively affects entrepreneurial well-being. In this paper, the effects of social support and individual factors on entrepreneurial well-being are discussed in a common framework, which provides a new and relatively comprehensive perspective for the research on entrepreneurial well-being.
The main contributions of this paper are as follows: First, it takes entrepreneurial well-being as the most important entrepreneurial outcome, which expands the traditional perspective of entrepreneurial results based on entrepreneurial performance and responds to the academic community’s initiative to study entrepreneurial well-being as an outcome of entrepreneurship. Second, it explores the influencing mechanism of social support on entrepreneurial well-being in the context of China, which enriches the localized research on entrepreneurial well-being and provides a new perspective for the research on the influencing factors of entrepreneurial well-being. Third, it reveals how social support affects entrepreneurial well-being through entrepreneurial self-efficacy and entrepreneurial performance, filling the theoretical gap between social support and entrepreneurial well-being. This paper not only theoretically explains the formation mechanism of entrepreneurial well-being, but also has practical implications for improving entrepreneurial well-being.
