MMTC seminar with Evy Van Lancker, Yasmine Van Heghe, and Mirjam Knockaert (Ghent University)

 MMTC seminar with Evy Van Lancker, Yasmine Van Heghe, and Mirjam Knockaert (Ghent University)

Evy is presenting the research titled as “Help, my work keeps changing!: The impact of pivoting on employee wellbeing and turnover”.

Over the past decades, scholars have increasingly paid attention to wellbeing in the entrepreneurship context – a context that offers a unique environment for people to flourish and develop. As such, scholarly work has been focusing on how entrepreneurs’ wellbeing is influenced by the intricacies of entrepreneurship, such as uncertainty or autonomy. To this date, the literature has however largely neglected an important actor whose wellbeing is likely also affected by the entrepreneurial context, namely early employees in entrepreneurial firms. Only recently, scholars have started to generate insights into wellbeing of employees in SMEs and growing firms. Furthermore, joiners – early nonfounding startup employees – remain largely overlooked. This is surprising as joiners face many challenges linked to early-stage entrepreneurial firms, such as a lack of routines, high levels of uncertainty, and continuous change. In this paper, we study the impact of pivoting (i.e., fundamentally changing business model aspects) on joiner turnover intentions. We build on the Job-Demands Resources (JD-R) model that suggests that characteristics specific to a work setting or occupation can either be defined as a demand or as a resource. In this light, we develop a multi-level model, proposing a cross-level indirect effect of pivoting on joiner turnover intentions via joiner emotional exhaustion, contingent on founder relational energy (i.e., “a heightened level of psychological resourcefulness generated from interpersonal interactions that enhances one’s capacity to do work”, here in the interactions between a joiner and founder). To achieve our research objectives, we use a time-lagged multilevel research design and collaborate with local accelerator programs to invite Flemish entrepreneurial firms to participate. In specific, we survey both founders and joiners by means of two survey waves, with a three-month time-lag in between. With this study, we aim to contribute to the entrepreneurship literature. In specific, our objective is to provide insights into the influence of firm-level dynamics, such as pivoting, as well as founder-level factors, such as founder relational energy, on joiner behavior. As such, we hope to add to the ongoing conversation on wellbeing in entrepreneurship by bringing a multilevel perspective to it. Similarly, we hope to provide insights into joiner retention, a highly strategic, yet understudied aspect of HRM in entrepreneurial firms.

The seminar will run in a hybrid format, you can join in room B6046 or on Zoom