Being your own boss and bossing others: the moderating effect of managing others on work meaning and autonomy for the self-employed and employees

Milena Nikolova, Boris Nikolaev () and Christopher Boudreaux
Additional contact information
Boris Nikolaev: Global Labor Organization (GLO)

Small Business Economics, 2023, vol. 60, issue 2, No 3, 463-483

Abstract: Abstract We examine the moderating role of being a supervisor for meaning and autonomy of self-employed and employed workers. We rely on regression analysis applied after entropy balancing based on a nationally representative dataset of over 80,000 individuals in 30 European countries for 2005, 2010, and 2015. We find that being a self-employed supervisor is correlated with more work meaningfulness and autonomy compared with being a salaried supervisor working for an employer. Wage supervisors and self-employed supervisors experience similar stress levels and have similar earnings, though self-employed supervisors work longer hours. Moreover, solo entrepreneurs experience slightly less work meaningfulness, but more autonomy compared with self-employed supervisors. This may be explained by the fact that solo entrepreneurs earn less but have less stress and shorter working hours than self-employed supervisors.

Keywords: Self-employment; Supervisors; Autonomy; Work meaningfulness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I31 L26 M10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11187-021-00597-z Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Being Your Own Boss and Bossing Others: The Moderating Effect of Managing Others on Work Meaning and Autonomy for the Self-Employed and Employees (2021)
Working Paper: Being your own boss and bossing others: The moderating effect of managing others on work meaning and autonomy for the self-employed and employees (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:sbusec:v:60:y:2023:i:2:d:10.1007_s11187-021-00597-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... 29/journal/11187/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11187-021-00597-z

Access Statistics for this article

Small Business Economics is currently edited by Zoltan J. Acs and David B. Audretsch

More articles in Small Business Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().