Abstract
Abstract
Entrepreneurs require support to fulfil their family and business roles successfully, especially support from their spouses. The research objective is to determine the impact of spousal emotional support which is the understanding, care, listening, affection affirmation, advice, love, concern, and consideration a spouse provides his or her partner on the individual performance of married entrepreneurs in Nigeria. Although the literature has widely focused on the impact of social and spousal support on mostly female entrepreneurs, spousal emotional support has not been measured as a singular construct in both married male and female entrepreneurs.
We therefore develop a multidimensional scale that included relational variables of relationship solidarity which are trust, commitment, perceived understanding, relationship satisfaction, evoked jealousy, and attributional confidence as variables related to the communication-based emotional support scale as suggested by Weber et al. (2004). These variables were used to measure spousal emotional support as a singular construct in both male and female entrepreneurs. Data was collected randomly from married entrepreneurs from the six geopolitical zones in Nigeria, and we used inferential statistical techniques to analyze and determine the relationship between entrepreneurial performance and spousal emotional support.
The result shows a linear, positive, low-level, non-statistically significant relationship between spousal emotional support and the individual performance of entrepreneurs. We therefore propose including spousal support as a resource that entrepreneurs can leverage for success in entrepreneurial education and mentoring programs because spousal emotional support could help entrepreneurs reduce the perennial conflict attributable to balancing work-family roles successfully and could also impact their entrepreneurial performance positively.
Keywords: Entrepreneurship, emotional support from spouses, entrepreneurial success