Psychological well-being sustainable during entrepreneurial process—the moderating role of entrepreneurial creativity

Abstract

Despite pitfalls during the entrepreneurial journey, entrepreneurship offers the opportunity to illuminate new ventures and preserve psychological well-being to sustain entrepreneurial development. From a dynamic perspective, this study discusses the early stage of the entrepreneurial process affecting student entrepreneurs’ psychological well-being and examines the moderating role of entrepreneurial creativity. By building a framework with the data of 1873 student entrepreneurs across 36 university business incubators in China involved in entrepreneurship activity, we found that entrepreneurial passion, alertness and intention had a positive correlation with entrepreneurs’ psychological well-being, but entrepreneurial action had the opposite effect. Entrepreneurial creativity positively moderated relationships between entrepreneurial action and students’ psychological well-being. This finding contributes to a full understanding of students’ psychological well-being on their entrepreneurial journey in the context of COVID-19 and eases the pressure of entrepreneurship by strengthening entrepreneurial creativity education.