It takes a family to lighten the load! The impact of family-to-business support on the stress and creativity of women micro-entrepreneurs in Sri Lanka

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine whether family-to-business support acts as a job resource that attenuates the negative effects of work demands on the stress and creativity of women micro-entrepreneurs in the informal sector in Sri Lanka.Design/methodology/approachData from 359 women micro-entrepreneurs and their respective case officers in local government were used to test the hypothesized relationship between work demands and their creativity through the mediating mechanism of stress and the moderating effect of family-to-business support on the said relationship.FindingsWork demands reduced creativity through heightening the levels of stress faced by women micro-entrepreneurs. However, family-to-business support reduced the negative influence of work demands on creativity through stress.Practical implicationsWomen micro-entrepreneurs should build strong family ties to obtain support from family members. In addition, government training programs that target women micro-entrepreneurs should be extended to include their immediate family members.Originality/valueThis paper contributes to the literature by examining whether family-to-business support buffers the negative effects of work demands for women micro-entrepreneurs in the informal sector. In doing so it makes a theoretical contribution by testing the key tenets of the JD-R model in entrepreneurial settings.

Work-family conflict, entrepreneurial regret, and entrepreneurial outcomes during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…We controlled for some other factors that could affect our dependent variables by following previous research on female entrepreneurship (e.g., De Clercq et al, 2021b ; Liu et al, 2019 ; Mari et al, 2016 ; Wijewardena et al, 2020 ). First, we controlled for respondents’ age , measured in number of years.…”

“…We advise that these agencies proactively provide female entrepreneurs, as well as their partners, spouses, and other family members with training sessions that primarily address the issue of managing and nurturing their work-life balance. Such training sessions could serve as an educational opportunity for family members to develop a sense of group cohesion and make them aware of the importance of allowing female entrepreneurs to access and leverage family resources, especially in the face of an economic crisis (Wijewardena et al, 2020 ). Our findings also suggest that public policymakers and entrepreneurship support agencies should make greater efforts to offer financial support to married female entrepreneurs to facilitate access to childcare and domestic services, thereby alleviating the pressure of work-family demands (Shelton, 2006 ).…”

COVID-19 pandemic, a blessing or a curse for sales? A study of women entrepreneurs from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa community

“…Family support during the pandemic was critical for the success of women entrepreneurs in this sample. And, although family support of women entrepreneurs is emphasized in the literature (Heilbrunn et al , 2014; Heilbrunn and Davidovitch, 2011; Wijewardena et al , 2020), other research shows no relationship between family organizational support and company performance (Batool, 2021) among Pakistani women entrepreneurs. However, the Batool (2021) sample was comprised of small and mid-sized businesses that were quite different from the informal, home-based women entrepreneurs studied here.…”

Antecedents and Consequences of Work Stress Behavior

“…Antecedents of work stress originating from work itself include workload (Harry, 2020;Oruh et al, 2020;Pandey, 2020;Sidhu et al, 2020), work environment (Oruh et al, 2020;Sidhu et al, 2020), work intensification (Walker, 2020), administrative/organizational pressure (Allison et al, 2019), work/job involvement (Li et al, 2018, Park andJang, 2017), work demands (Wijewardena et al, 2020), time pressure ( Amirudin, 2019), working conditions (Goswami et al, 2019), evaluation and performance appraisal systems (Pandey, 2020) and the uncertainty of working conditions (Hampton et al, 2019).…”

“…Observations show that research on work stress is carried out in the construction professional profession (Ajayi et al, 2019;Hampton et al, 2019;Naoum et al, 2018), the police (Allison et al, 2019;Li et al, 2018;Nisar and Rasheed, 2019), teachers and headmaster (Heyder, 2019;Hu et al, 2019;Kongcharoen et al, 2019;Walker, 2020), Paramedics (Bjaalid, 2020;Duschek et al, 2019;Klein et al, 2019;Manoppo, 2020;Park et al, 2020;Rasool et al, 2020;Saadeh and Suifan, 2020;Zaghini et al, 2020), hotel industry employees (Goswani et al, 2019;Yousaf et al, 2020) and banking industry employees (Darte-Baah, 2019;Kashif et al, 2017;Oruh et al, 2020;Pandey, 2020;Parveen and Adeinat, 2019;Tripathi and Bharadwaja, 2018;Wu, 2020;). Some professions are only studied by one researcher, for example in the profession of daycare leader (Elomaa et al, 2020), library staff (Petek, 2018), the salesperson (Peaslay et al, 2020), women micro-entrepreneurs (Wijewardena et al., 2020), auditors (Amirudin, 2019), immigration officers (Yang et al, 2019), employees in the electricity sector (Sidhu et al, 2020), lecturers (Rafida, 2020), cabin crewmembers (Hu et al, 2017) and sales agents…”