When discrimination is worse, autonomy is key: How women entrepreneurs leverage job autonomy resources to find work–life balance

| Dirk De Clercq, Journal of Business Ethics

For women entrepreneurs, finding work-life balance can add to their work motivation, job satisfaction, and improve the performance of their businesses. However, successfully meeting their goal of balancing both work and private life demands can be challenging, especially when work pressure spills over into their private lives. The primary objective of this project was to detail how and when women entrepreneurs’ sense of job autonomy might increase their work-life balance.

This study contributed to existing research by investigating job autonomy as a precursor for work-life balance and looked at the external conditions where job autonomy proves to be most useful. The project used multi-source data from 5,334 women entrepreneurs from 37 countries and examined the impact of several sources of macro-level adversity: socio-economic, institutional, and cultural.

The researchers found that the ability for women entrepreneurs to leverage their experienced job autonomy in efforts to achieve work-life balance increases when significant socio-economic and institutional adversity marks the surrounding macro-level context. Notably, the researchers also found that job autonomy enhances work-life balance to a greater extent when cultural discrimination is low.

Some discriminatory factors are slow to change. Job autonomy accordingly can play a critical role in facilitating work-life balance among women entrepreneurs, particularly in countries that are not as supportive in general to women in business.

De Clercq, D., & Brieger, S.A. (2022). When Discrimination is Worse, Autonomy is Key: How Women Entrepreneurs Leverage Job Autonomy Resources to Find Work–Life Balance. Journal of Business Ethics, 177, 665–682. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-021-04735-1