Abstract
Social entrepreneurship is often portrayed as psychologically sustaining process based on purpose, prosocial motivation, and social impact. Yet earlier studies document stress, burnout, and mental health vulnerability among social entrepreneurs, producing a fragmented and contradictory literature on their well-being. In this work, we explicitly examine founder-level psychological processes among the social entrepreneurs. Using the abductive, psychological mechanism-based approach informed by process theorization and action-phase logic, we identify five recurring psychological mechanism families that regulate social entrepreneurial well-being across different phases of entry, enactment, accumulation, disruption, and repair. This study addresses the key issue of how psychological mechanism sustain and undermine well-being over time? Building on the findings, we develop an integrative psychological mechanism cycle that conceptualizes well-being as a dynamic, regulated process not as a static outcome shaped by moral commitment, identity enactment, cumulative strain, and autonomy conditions, including recovery practices. The study further explains why the founders, facing similar missions and constraints, experience divergent eudaimonic well-being trajectories, including thriving, strain, breakdown, reorientation, and meaningful exit.