Friday 24 July 09:50
- 11:20
Hall: 02 - Teatrino
Chair:
Barbieri Barbara
Co-Chair:
Loi Michela
Division: Division 1: Work and Organizational Psychology
This symposium is centered on analyzing the emerging link between entrepreneurship and health, which recent research has highlighted as an essential topic requiring in-depth investigation (Shepherd & Patzelt, 2017).
Entrepreneurship is a relatively new and growing field of research (Wiklund et al., 2019). Scholars have examined its dynamics and implications by emphasizing its economic aspects. However, its broad definition as a transformative process that changes—sometimes radically and structurally—social and institutional contexts through the agentic power of entrepreneurs (McMullen et al., 2021) emphasizes that other implications, beyond economic ones, are fundamental to address (Wiklund et al., 2019). For instance, the link between entrepreneurship and democracy/politics exemplifies how entrepreneurship dynamics and implications can affect our society (Audretsch, 2021; Farè et al., 2023).
By relying on Shepherd and Patzelt (2017), we refer to health as both physical health—"the physiological and physical status of the body"—and mental health—"the state of mind, including basic intellectual functions." Throughout the five contributions, this symposium aims to focus on health by considering two different streams of research: entrepreneurial well-being and the psychological impact of entrepreneurship education.
First, we discuss the link between entrepreneurship and well-being (Stephan et al., 2023), highlighting how team dynamics in the early stages of the entrepreneurial process could impact team performance and members' well-being. Second, we address the impact of teaching entrepreneurship to dropout targets (e.g., Jennings, 2014; Jennings Mayo-Wilson et al., 2020), showing how this could leverage or hamper individual changes at both the psychological and economic levels.
Taken together, the contributions highlight new potential streams of research that could have relevant implications for applied psychology, contributing to this year's debate conference centered on discussing new directions for applied psychology.
