Entrepreneurs’ Capacity for Mentalizing: Its Influence on Burnout Syndrome

Abstract

Burnout is a mental disorder that leads to difficulties for the entrepreneur in controlling his or her personal and professional life. The most common consequences of entrepreneurial burnout include the subject experiencing low motivation, low organizational commitment, loss of energy, demoralization in connection with their work, poor quality of work, feeling of failure, and the perception that his or her company is performing poorly. We used a sample of 157 Spanish entrepreneurs selected at random from the Iberian Balance Sheet Analysis System database. We employed the Spanish version of the Reflective Functioning Questionnaire to measure mentalizing and the Spanish version of the Maslach-Burnout Inventory-General Survey (MBI-GS) to measure burnout. This research showed that entrepreneurial burnout could be avoided in part if the entrepreneur achieved a good capacity for mentalizing. Hypomentalizing contributed to explaining entrepreneurs’ levels of professional efficacy, cynicism, and emotional exhaustion. In contrast, the explanatory power of hypermentalizing was not significant for any of the dimensions of burnout. This study provides new evidence of burnout in entrepreneurs; a professional group with an important economic, politic, and social role has been little studied.

Resilience, Mentalizing and Burnout Syndrome among Healthcare Workers during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Serbia

“…As in the previously mentioned study [ 21 ], the capacity for mentalizing was examined using the hypomentalizing and hypermentalizing scales of the Reflective Functioning Questionnaire of 8 items (RFQ-8) [ 18 ]. RFQ-8 consists of two subscales: (1) a subscale of certainty in one’s own assessment of mental states (RFQ-c), and (2) a subscale of uncertainty in one’s own ability to assess one’s own and others’ mental states (RFQ-u).…”

“…Hypermentalizing refers to making too many assumptions about intentional mental states, some of which are uncritically accepted as true, even though they are not true. It is manifested as excessive certainty in the accuracy of one’s own beliefs about the nature of mental states that underlie one’s behavior [ 18 , 21 ].…”

“…There are findings that indicate that the capacity for mentalizing allows a correct understanding of one’s own and others’ behavior in stressful situations, which helps in overcoming stress [ 19 , 22 ]. Manzano-Garcia et al [ 21 ] have shown that the capacity for mentalizing reduces the degree of burnout in entrepreneurs in Spain by reducing emotional exhaustion and cynicism. In that study, hypomentalizing had statistically significant positive correlations with emotional exhaustion and cynicism as aspects of burnout.…”

“…In that study, hypomentalizing had statistically significant positive correlations with emotional exhaustion and cynicism as aspects of burnout. Hypomentalizing was a statistically significant positive predictor of emotional exhaustion and cynicism in Spanish entrepreneurs [ 21 ]. Findings show that resilience and burnout in doctors are interrelated phenomena; greater resilience means less burnout, and vice versa [ 7 , 14 , 15 ].…”

Modelo Integrado de Burnout entre Policiais do Distrito Federal: uma Ampliação Conceitual

“…-García et al, 2021;Sanz-Vergel et al, 2010;Shimazu, Sonnentag, Kubota, & Kawakami, 2012;Sonnentag & Fritz, 2007) e relações nulas com distanciamento psicológico(Merino-Tejedor et al, 2017;Sonnentag, 2018).…”