6 Factors That Actually Help Determine Entrepreneur Fulfillment You Need to Know
The first thing that may come to mind to explain the difference is the amount of money a person makes. While it is true that entrepreneur profit is linked to job satisfaction, there are also many other factors that determine fulfillment. This includes:
- The importance of considering not only autonomy but also the entrepreneurs’ needs for variety and feedback. Entrepreneurs score higher on these needs than non-entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs who focus solely on autonomy while ignoring their needs for variety and feedback feel less satisfied.
- The importance of your motivation for becoming an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs who start their business because they saw an opportunity are more satisfied than those who started their business out of necessity, and also more satisfied than those who started their business out of a combination of opportunity and necessity. This finding holds up even when they make the same amount of money – entrepreneurs who started because of opportunity feel more fulfilled than those who had other motivations.
- The finding that entrepreneurship must lead to the feeling of achievement in order to feel satisfied overall. Specifically, entrepreneurs who feel that they’ve achieved a high level of income, creativity, independence, flexibility and security end up feeling more satisfied than others who don’t believe they have achieved those things.
- The interesting link between education and fulfillment. More specifically, entrepreneurs with high levels of general education end up less satisfied with the income generated from their startups than those who had specific educational experiences. Researchers suspect this has to do with higher education leading to higher expectations for income, and the comparison of an entrepreneur’s salary with school peers that have higher salaries in their non-entrepreneurial jobs.
- First-time founders tend to be more satisfied than entrepreneurs with past experience launching businesses, regardless of whether those past ventures succeeded or failed.
- Entrepreneurs who had mentors have more self-efficacy (the feeling that they can accomplish their goals) than those who did not have mentors. Mentoring has a bigger effect when the mentors step in earlier on in the creation of a business, and when their mentoring style helps by encouraging autonomous decision making by the entrepreneur himself, rather than the mentor directing decisions.
Today many academics are continuing their research on entrepreneurship and fulfillment to discover the key factors that make entrepreneurs more satisfied with their business. This research can contribute to solutions for making entrepreneurship more satisfying for everyone who chooses that path – like creating the proper mentoring relationships that aid satisfaction, and ensuring that the entrepreneur’s work fulfills their other needs for variety, feedback, and accomplishment.
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