Techno-overload and well-being of French small business owners: identifying the flipside of digital technologies

Technostress is an important by-product of information and communication technologies (ICT). The technostress literature suggests focusing on specific dimensions of technostress, such as techno-overload, which describes when ICT usage demands to work faster and longer. However, only a few studies have dealt with the technostress of small business owners, let alone techno-overload. This is surprising since work overload in general has been identified as an important dimension of job stress for small business owners, and technostress has been identified as an important impediment for workers in general. The aim of the current study is to investigate the effect of techno-overload on well-being outcomes (as a composite measure consisting of physical well-being, mental well-being, sleep quality, burnout, and loneliness) using three data sets of French small business owners. Our results indicate a strong negative correlation between techno-overload and our composite measure of well-being for all three data sets. We interpret our findings for several different disciplines: information systems, small business owners and entrepreneurship, health and well-being, psychology and organization studies. Our data also allow for the identification of contextual effects–the COVID-19 pandemic–since one survey was conducted before, one at the start of, and one during the pandemic. © 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Entrepreneurial Intention of Dutch Students During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Are Today’s Students Still Tomorrow’s Entrepreneurs?

In early 2020, it became clear that policy and public health responses to the pandemic would generate an unprecedented economic crisis. Entrepreneurship is documented as helping economies recover from economic slowdowns (Koellinger & Thurik, Review of Economics and Statistics 94, 1143–1156, 2012). Hence, the immediate reaction of our Rotterdam and Montpellier entrepreneurship research groups was to start looking for ways to assess the development of entrepreneurial intention (EI). In particular, we focus on students, since they may be the ones to create a novel wave of firms to fill in the gaps caused by the crisis or to replace firms weakened by the crisis. The present analysis is the first to investigate whether and in which direction EI has changed in the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic using a survey of approximately 1000 students from Erasmus University Rotterdam. Moreover, we study how a set of COVID-19-related, context-related, and demographic variables is connected to changes in EI. While most students report their EI to be unaffected by the pandemic, 16% report a decrease in EI, and 19% report an increase in EI. These changes appear to be most strongly associated with pandemic-induced changes in mental health and with gender. We find that students who report a negative change in their mental health are more likely to indicate lower EI rather than higher EI. Moreover, females are more likely to indicate decreased EI due to the pandemic, while males are more likely to report increased EI, indicating a potential increase in the gender gap in entrepreneurship. Additionally, students with higher trust in the government are less likely to report lower EI relative to similar EI. Finally, we also find associations between change in EI and expected income in 10 years, compliance with COVID-19 regulations, age, and international student status. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on entrepreneurship and small businesses

Plain English Summary Responding to COVID-19 involves not just shielding small business jobs, supporting entrepreneurship, and raising government debt but also creating productive entrepreneurship and resilient location-specific entrepreneurial ecosystems. The COVID-19 pandemic is an unprecedented challenge for small businesses that also brings new market opportunities. The papers in this special issue of Small Business Economics Journal aim to shed light on the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic by looking at the macro- and microeconomic effects on entrepreneurship and small businesses as well as the role of financial support policies and well-being in both developed and developing countries. Future research should focus on the role of digitization and financial mechanisms supporting small businesses during crises. The existential threat to small businesses, based on their crucial role in the economy, is behind the plethora of scholarly studies in 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Examining the 15 contributions of the special issue on the "Economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on entrepreneurship and small businesses," the paper comprises four parts: a systematic review of the literature on the effect on entrepreneurship and small businesses;a discussion of four literature strands based on this review;an overview of the contributions in this special issue;and some ideas for post-pandemic economic research.