Mental health and entrepreneurship: A bibliometric study and literature review

Abstract

Nowadays we can find a lot of studies on entrepreneurship which give more emphasis to the field’s health-related issues. On the other side, it is unknown how far an entrepreneur’s mental health is impacted by their environment. In this article, we intend to contribute to existing literature by emphasizing the relationships between mental health and business. Our result is achieved by employing a two-step research methodology: 1) We use bibliometric approaches to analyze contributions to business and economics research and provide a comprehensive mental health discussion in entrepreneurship and business environment in general by looking at the most significant foundation papers. 2) To back up these conclusions, a content analysis of the most relevant academic papers was carried out utilizing a broader database, describing the correlation between the studies of mental health and entrepreneurship at the individual and organizational levels.

Keywords:

• mental health
• entrepreneurship
• entrepreneurs
• bibliometric

PUBLIC INTEREST STATEMENT

Health-related concerns facing the industry are receiving increased attention in the literature on entrepreneurship. On the other hand, it is unclear how an entrepreneur’s environment affects their mental health. By highlighting the connections between mental health and business in this piece of research, we contribute to modern literature of business and entrepreneurship. This article is an elaboration of bibliometric study examining relevant publications in mental health and entrepreneurship topics. We employed visualization software to visually explained the results of bibliometric methodologies to examine contributions to business and economics research and present a thorough contextual picture of mental health discussions in entrepreneurship and business environment in general.

1. Introduction

Over the past ten years, entrepreneurship research has reflected the growing trend in entrepreneurial activity that has an impact on governments, societies, economies, and people in general (Fanaja et al., 2023). According to various studies, becoming an entrepreneur is one of the toughest career choices, even if the risks are occasionally thought to be smaller than those of paid workers (Cardon & Patel, 2015; Patzelt & Shepherd, 2011; Van Praag & Versloot, 2007). Another sign of this trend is the rise in scholarly works on entrepreneurship in industrialised nations like the United States (Trueman et al., 2013), England (Stock et al., 2016), and Germany (Hetschko, 2016). These articles address topics that are crucial to the wellbeing of the entrepreneur, such as work-family conflict (Nguyen & Sawang, 2016), self-employment (Binder & Coad, 2013), and stress (Cardon & Patel, 2015).

Entrepreneurs frequently start a business venture to launch new products or services on the market. Volery and Pullich (2010) define the term “self-employed” as a person who chooses to work for themselves as a business owner or freelancer as opposed to an employer. An individual who manages a small business is known as a small business owner-manager. By definition, a self-employed person is an entrepreneur, however this isn’t always the case (Hasbi et al., 2022). However, not all studies define the term “entrepreneur”; instead, they make assumptions about its meaning, and typically, these assumptions limit the definition to the parameters of the study (Savitri et al., 2021).

An entrepreneur, in the words of Kartawinata et al. (2021), is first and foremost a risk-taker who works in an uncertain environment and is aggressive, inventive, and creates new chances. Arguably, becoming an entrepreneur is a challenging venture that comes with numerous challenges, involving decision-making, seizing opportunities, and networking (Kartawinata et al., 2021). This raises the question of whether business owners are able to maintain a sense of wellbeing during the entire process. Well-being has been studied from a variety of perspectives, including sociological, economic, and psychological ones (Hennekam et al., 2021).

Research efforts are now focused on studies that support the notion that “well-being” is a combination of happy emotions and a sense of meaning in life, good relationships and family support, having a fulfilling, attractive job, having sufficient income, being physically and mentally healthy, having important goals related to personal values, and living in a democratic environment and a stable society (Diener & Seligman, 2004). Although primarily studied in psychology, medicine, and public health, mental health and well-being (MWB) is currently garnering more attention from other academic disciplines (Hennekam et al., 2021). The idea to create national well-being accounts is a sign of this greater interest (Stiglitz, Sen, & Fitoussi, 2009). Entrepreneurs are no different from ordinary people in that they both require MWB for efficient functioning (Kumala et al., 2021).

This article’s informational framework is built using bibliometric data. Data on subjects including productivity, the number of publications produced, the number of citations received, and indications of the importance of the articles were included in the statistical analysis (Devos, 2011). Additionally, it produced a qualitative assessment of a journal’s standard, including a judgement of whether it publishes works outside of its purview and if the editors of the entrepreneur journal nurture the most successful writers. We searched the Scopus database for relevant articles, and this study presents unique bibliometric analysis data and highlights key patterns in publications on entrepreneurs’ mental health and wellbeing.

2. Method

For the sampling method, researchers employed the Scopus databases as the data source. This database was chosen because of its wider coverage of good quality journals. As one of the bibliographic databases with the most thorough coverage, Scopus depicts the precise amounts of citations obtained (Rovira et al., 2019). It also provides a component used to determine their ranks, as specific information provided by Scopus bibliographic databases (Dewi et al., 2022).

There have been a number of earlier studies that have analyzed or predicted future citation patterns. Numerous research have employed machine learning techniques (Adankon et al., 2009; Chen & Guestrin, 2016; Sandulescu & Chiru, 2016). To reflect the finding that works published for longer periods of time typically earn more citations, generative models have been used in a number of citation prediction studies (Newman, 2009).

Our data were acquired on 20 September 2022, with the keywords “entrepreneurship” along with “Mental” and “Health” in the title. Afterwards, we tracked the main themes or subjects that emerged in the publication using a keyword co-occurrence analysis in order to uncover publication trends and plot the main contributors (author, university, and source name) (Porter et al., 2002). To visualize the data, we used the VOSViewer program, developed by researchers at Leiden University, to present the data using data visualization (van Eck & Waltman, 2010). Additionally, in order to acquire data and conduct a complete analysis and choose the most important studies, the researcher in this study followed 5 stages (Fahimnia et al., 2015). Figure 1 depicts the flows of providing data and visualization in this article.

Figure 1. Five stages of bibliometric literature study method.

Source: (Fahimnia et al., 2015)

2.1. Defining the appropriate search term

In this study, the keyword for Publish or Perish is entrepreneurship. To guarantee the legitimacy of the data, keywords should be established and documented prior to database searching. In this study, the terms “entrepreneurship” and “mental health” were combined. The investigation was conducted in September 2022.

2.2. Initial search results

There are guidelines for picking journals, however for this research the type of article—a research article—rather than the journal’s year was chosen. where the SCOPUS database is used to collect data (Li et al., 2022). Author names, citations, document titles, years, source titles, volumes, publications, pages, number of citations, source types, document types, abstracts, and keywords are all attached to the first search result export to.xlsx file. The.xlsx file is then converted into a spreadsheet for sorting, and a graph is created after that. The search results are further kept in RIS format.

2.3. Refinement of the search results

The choice of papers was made with the goal of ensuring their applicability to the study’s goals. There were 40 items total that were gathered. After carefully reviewing the article abstracts, a second round of selection was conducted, and 37 articles were ultimately chosen.

2.4. Fourth-level data statistics

Author, citation, document title, year, source title, volume, publication, number of citations, source and document type, abstract, and keywords are the basis for the bibliometric analysis done by Publish or Perish. This software, Publish or Perish, then refers to the procedure of quickly processing publications or articles relevant to the information with the author’s search keywords (Susanto et al., 2022). Additionally, the study makes use of Vosviewer, which emphasises authors and keywords, and then incorporates findings from earlier studies in the RIS file format.

2.5. Data analysis

Co-authorship, co-occurrence, and citation analysis were aided by the usage of VOSviewer software in this study’s data analysis. Software called VOSviewer may be used to assess item similarities (van Eck & Waltman, 2010).

3. Result and discussion

This study reviews 37 articles related to mental health and well-being on entrepreneurship. During this period, the most research about mental health and well-being on entrepreneurship occurred in 2022 with 11 papers (29.7%). At the beginning of its appearance, publications mental health and well-being on entrepreneurship, from 1987 to 2011, only 1 to 2 publications. In 2020 and 2022 an increase in the number of publications on mental health and well-being on entrepreneurship was published (Table 1).

Table 1. Number of paper

Year	Number of Paper
1987	1
1990	1
1991	2
1992	1
1994	2
2011	1
2015	3
2016	3
2018	1
2019	1
2020	5
2021	5
2022	11
Total	37

Figure 2 illustrates the propensity for the number of papers to vary each year. From 1 paper in 2019 to 5 papers in 2020 to 5 papers in 2021, and then being steady until 2022 with 5 papers, there was a second increase to 11 papers. Since 2022 won’t be finished until December 2022, our data is still just provisional, therefore the collection of articles used for this research can still be expanded until September 2022.

Figure 2. Number of paper.

This study intends to investigate the mental health and well-being on entrepreneurship in greater detail, sources from Scopus database. In this study, the co-authorship, co-accuracy, and citations were presented as three different features of the data analysis using VOSviewer. The explanation that follows shows the findings of the analysis that was done.

3.1. Co-authorship

Figure 3 has been presented regarding the authors who have a connected network. In Figure 3, the authors take a theme related to mental health and well-being in entrepreneurship, but only Follmer, K. and Hannekam, S. are related to one another, Therefore, it is hoped that more researchers would work together in the future to provide study findings of a better calibre. There are 35 contributors in this article who discuss mental health and wellbeing in business.

Figure 3. Co-authorship.

3.2. Co-accuracy

The author used a co-occurrence analysis kind of term and retrieved 55 keywords using the full counting approach with a minimum of 1 co-occurrence. The frequency of words used in articles is displayed using the co-occurrence analysis of keywords (Gaviria-Marin et al., 2018). Therefore, from 55 keywords there are only 35 keywords that meet the criteria we looked for, which are focusing on entrepreneurship, SMEs, mental health, and related terminologies such as “psychology” and “well-being”. Figure 3 display of the co-occurrence data for keywords demonstrates this.

Based on the size of the circle, Figure 4 is used to determine which terms are frequently used. The combined mapping and grouping in Figure 4 provide most recent overview in the field of entrepreneurship research. Each category is represented by a distinct colour to signify the variations in its relevance, proximity, and interrelationships. This means that “the density of the element increases with the number of nearby elements and decreases with the distance between these elements and the place of interest” (van Eck & Waltman, 2010). The most often appearing terms are “mental health” and “entrepreneurship,” according to an analysis of co-occurrence (keyword co-occurrence) shown in Figure 4. Given these findings, which show a substantial correlation between entrepreneurship and mental health, Buttner (1992) poses an intriguing question: “Is entrepreneurial stress bad for your health?” Additionally, there is some empirical support for the idea that the characteristics of the entrepreneurial process affect a person’s propensity to experience depression (Parslow et al., 2004; Yoon & Bernell, 2013).

Figure 4. Co-accurrence (keywords).

Additionally, quitting entrepreneurship unintentionally (or due to financial issues) may be linked to a rise in depression in the next term (Singh et al., 2007). There is a case to be made that aspects like entrepreneurial demands and obstacles can lead to the emergence of mental health issues, but power over decisions and entrepreneurial success might mitigate these adverse impacts (Hessels et al., 2017; Rietveld et al., 2015). The demands and challenges faced by different types of entrepreneurs are very likely to differ from one another (Wennberg & DeTienne, 2014); for instance, high-growth entrepreneurs face greater demands than so-called lifestyle entrepreneurs, who merely seek to earn enough money to maintain their own way of life certain (Bhide, 1996).

In addition to “mental health” and “entrepreneurship,” there were other important keywords that we should have paid attention to. One word that has become a hot topic in the corporate world is “innovation.” The relationship between human resource elements and innovation has been examined in recent works by Dziallas & Blind (2019) and Pradana et al. (2020). However, we must concentrate on how innovation will highlight more companies, particularly SMEs, for capturing the market. Another occurring keyword in our result is “happiness”. Although this word feels more like a psychological concept rather than a business terminology, we cannot neglect its importance. Studies have shown that in the end, happiness is a major motivation driving people in conducting business activities (Salem et al., 2022; Dewi et al., 2022)

The visualisation overlay in Figure 5 may show how much the popularity of certain terms has increased over time; the more yellow the cluster, the more recent the study is. Figure 5 demonstrates how the evolution of keywords has accelerated in recent years. Yellow keywords like mental health, innovation, environment, welfare, and others show this. These results might serve as a starting point for additional study to create entrepreneurship-related keywords.

Figure 5. Overlay visualization co-accurance (keywords).

Figure 6 depicts the number of nodes that are close to one another as well as the density of keywords that appear together (Pradana et al., 2023). The amount of terms that appear frequently is indicated by the yellow nodes, which show the level of saturation. The keyword “mental health,” which appears the most frequently, is in the yellow node, indicating that this issue has received the most research. The subjects on the green nodes, such as “happiness,” “business,” and “promotion effect,” are different. Green nodes indicate that a topic has not been extensively studied. These findings suggest that pleasure in business is a marker of an entrepreneur’s health and wellbeing, which has been found to be an essential mental state necessary for effective human functioning in general (Fanaja et al., 2023). Previous research claimed that a crucial component of entrepreneurship success is the cohabitation of job satisfaction, career success, and happiness (Wach et al., 2016). This suggests that if a small business owner is consistently unhappy, angry, and depressed, the company may not grow (Uy et al., 2017). Indeed, previous research has found that entrepreneurship happiness supports an entrepreneur’s persistence and resilience in leading new initiatives, and less happy entrepreneurs are more likely to stop their businesses even when they are lucrative (Carree & Verheul, 2012).

Figure 6. Overlay visualization co-accurance (keywords).

The size of the yellow node indicates issues that recur frequently, and these topics are also input for the editor to check to see if they still pertain to the reviewer’s assigned scientific discipline. The review’s outcomes won’t be ideal, especially in terms of substance, if each reviewer’s scientific specialty is not acceptable. The introduction of these subjects serves as evaluation material for editors as they attempt to focus the journal’s scope in order to make it more focused. Additionally, editors use this density visualization as a foundation for selecting Editors and Reviewers whose scientific specialties align with the issues shown in Figure 6.

3.3. Citation

The study was utilised to identify the articles that had the biggest impact on entrepreneurs’ mental health and wellbeing. More information about the top 10 referenced articles on mental health and wellbeing in entrepreneurship can be found in Table 2.

Table 2. Top citations

Ranking	Citation	Tittle	Author	Year
1	35	Coping with mental health conditions at work and its impact on self-perceived job performance	Hennekam, S.	2020
2	22	Enterprising social wellbeing: Social entrepreneurial and strengths based approaches to mental health and wellbeing in “remote” Indigenous community contexts	Tedmanson, D.	2011
3	13	Mental health of business academics within the COVID−19 era: can meaningful work help? A qualitative study	Mousa, M.	2022
4	13	Social Enterprise in Mental Health: An Overview	Mandiberg, J.M.	2016
5	10	Remaking “Community” Mental Health: Contested Institutional Logics and Organizational Change	Spitzmueller, M.C.	2018
6	10	The paradox of mental illness and employment: a person-job fit lens	Hennekam, S.	2021
7	9	Entrepreneurship, clinical psychology, and mental health: An exciting and promising new field of research	Wiklund, J.	2020
8	9	Entrepreneurial Dynamics and Patient Involvement in Service Innovation: Developing a Model to Promote Growth and Sustainability in Mental Health Care	Sindakis, S.	2016
9	7	A multiple case study of mental health interventions in middle income countries: Considering the science of delivery	Kidd, S.	2016
10	7	Social Entrepreneurship and Mental Health Intervention: a Literature Review and Scan of Expert Perspectives	Kidd, S.	2015

Table 2 shows the top 10 most cited articles from the time of its publication to the time of writing this paper, most citations are dominated by papers published in 2016. According to Table 2, the paper with the most citations, “Coping with mental health conditions at work and its impact on self-perceived job performance,” was written by Hennekam, S (2020) and had a total of 35 citations. The purpose of Hennekam, S (2020) research is the exploratory qualitative study looked at how people with mental health disorders manage their symptoms at work and how mental health conditions affect how people view their job performance. This research by Hennekam, S (2020) was published in the Employee Relations: The International Journal Volume 42. The quantity of citations is crucial for a journal’s reputation because it allows one to gauge the journal’s influence on scientific advancement (DiBitetti & Ferreras, 2017). Journal management must pay attention to the elements that affect citations in the text because the quantity of citations is also a sign of an article’s quality (Bai et al., 2019). The journal administration must do a desk review as soon as possible to identify whether the submitted manuscript has the potential to be cited in other papers when it is published online (Pradana et al., 2023). This definitely cannot be divorced from the journal’s fundamental emphasis and scope.

The authors who contributed to publishing their papers on the topic of mental health and well-being in business are also classified according to the reviewed articles; Table 3 lists the authors who were most prolific.

Table 3. Top authors

Author	Number of Paper
Hennekam, S.	3
Mousa, M.	3

Based on the above table, there are 2 writers who wrote 3 paper titles published on the theme of mental health and well-being on entrepreneurship. The top writer, Hennekam, S., wrote 3 papers, the paper was titled “Coping with mental health conditions at work and its impact on self-perceived job performance,” “The paradox of mental illness and employment: a person-job fit lens” and “Exploring mental illness in the workplace: the role of HR professionals and processes”. Second top writer, Mousa, M., wrote 3 papers, was titled “Mental health of business academics within the COVID−19 era: can meaningful work help? A qualitative study,” “Mental illness of management educators: does holding multiple academic jobs play a role? A qualitative study” and “Talent management practices in the extreme context of hospitality sector: an exploratory study.”

According to results of the analysis, it is still difficult to discern how closely the authors of studies on business and mental health and wellbeing are related. Since there are no clusters in this study, it is hoped that more researchers would work together in the future to produce higher-quality research findings. Since 2020, keywords have risen in development. From these keywords, it is also clear that entrepreneurship can be influenced by mental health and well-being as well as how they affect one another.

The World Health Organization (WHO) defines health as a condition of whole physical, mental, and social well-being and does not just refer to the absence of sickness or disability (World Health Organization, 2020). In other word, mental health as a “state of well-being in which every individual realizes his or her own potential, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to her or his community,” rather than simply the absence of mental health problems (WHO, 2014). A idea that is closely tied to health is well-being. It is a developing field of study that can be characterized as the equilibrium between a person’s resources and the problems they confront (Dodge et al., 2012). Additionally, better health and longevity, stronger social ties, creativity, enjoyment, and work success are all positively connected with subjective well-being, which includes how individuals view and evaluate their own lives (Diener et al., 2018).

It is possible that business owners are not entirely aware of the impact their health can have on their performance over the long run (Volery & Pullich, 2010). They interpret health negatively (as not being unwell), seeing it as a means of doing their obligations. Business owners often focus on the physical element of health and wellness and have a good understanding of its possible risks. They have poorer understanding of the social and psychological facets of health. Due to the rigours of starting and growing a business, entrepreneurs usually assume that they are overly consumed with their company and are, as a result, denied of engaging in extracurricular activities (Hennekam et al., 2020). Therefore, stress significantly affects the mental health of entrepreneurs.

4. Conclusion

In this study, co-authorship, co-occurrence, and citation are the three key elements that are determined using bibliometric analytic approaches. These papers were pulled without regard to publication date from the SCOPUS database. We excluded any studies that were redundant, irrelevant, lacked keywords in the title, abstract, or keywords, or were the incorrect sort of document (such as book chapters). 37 articles were derived from the clauses that have been subject to keyword and other limitations.

According to GEM (2017–2018), the rate of entrepreneurship is on the rise, and a considerable proportion of individuals have plans to launch a business in the near future. We also believe that mental health and well-being serve as an engine in the lives of entrepreneurs, since they must understand the benefits of these activities in order for their businesses to exist. These advantages can be categorized based on the ambitions and objectives of entrepreneurs, but it all boils down to innovation, which is inherent in individuals who seek to maximize their well-being. Further study is needed to address the well-being of entrepreneurs, who are the cornerstone of many economic efforts, considering the importance of entrepreneurship in the contemporary economy. Therefore, larger, more representative, and longer sample sizes should be used in future studies on employer health. In order to better understand the connection between entrepreneurs and their well-being, this bibliometric review summarises and gathers data from a vast number of research (Perianes-Rodriguez et al., 2016).

There are a number of limitations on this study, which can also be seen as suggestions for additional investigation. First, since only the Scopus database was used for this research’s article searches, papers whose journals were not indexed in Scopus were left out of the analysis. Future research can also be conducted using a number of other databases, including Web of Science. Second, only papers discovered to be written in English were included in this analysis; papers written in other languages were excluded. As a result, information can be gathered from each of these sources in future research, and the analysis’s findings can be compared to those from this one. It is safe to infer that this research is not exhaustive given all the above mentioned constraints. It is nevertheless thought that a thorough bibliometric analysis is given, and a number of significant works have been incorporated in this study. We believe that along with existing research in entrepreneurship, our result provides contributions for future development and may identify the components that have been mainly addressed to achieve entrepreneurial well-being.

It is claimed that this research project sheds fresh light on the literature on mental health and entrepreneurship. The research community hopes that this study will serve as a valuable informational resource for those who are interested in undertaking additional studies in this area.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mahir Pradana

Mahir Pradana is an Assistant Professor in the Postgraduate Department of Business Administration, Telkom University (Bandung, Indonesia). His research interests are tourism, entrepreneurship, innovation and marketing modelling. His works have been published in international journals such as Technology Analysis & Strategic Management, Journal of Islamic Marketing, Local Environment, Journal of Innovation and Knowledge, etc.

Hanifah Putri Elisa

Hanifah Putri Elisa is a student in the Postgraduate Department of Business Administration, Telkom University (Bandung, Indonesia).

Dian Gita Utami

Dian Gita Utami is a lecturer in the Department of Business Administration, Politeknik Ujung Pandang, Bandung, Indonesia. Her works have been published in Journal of Islamic Marketing, Local Environment, and Educational Administration: Theory & Practice.