School of Management & Entrepreneurship Organizing a Seminar on ‘Self-employment and psychological well-being’

The School of Management & Entrepreneurship invites you to the Research Seminar Series of luminary talks. The next talk of the series will be delivered by Dr Shruti Sardeshmukh, Associate Professor at the University of South Australia.

Scheduled on 24 March 2022, at 12.00 PM, the talk is titled ‘Self-employment and psychological well-being’

Prof Shruti Sardeshmukh is the executive co-director of the Centre for Enterprise Dynamics in Global Economies (C-EDGE) at the University of South Australia. Her research is about enabling innovation and entrepreneurship and diversity and inclusion. Shruti has collaborated internationally with researchers from the US, Australia, and India. Her research has been published in Organizational Research Methods, Academy of Management Learning and Education, Human Resource Management, and Journal of Small Business Management. Shruti comes from Mumbai, India. She has an MBA (PGDM) from IIM Calcutta and a PhD from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the US.

Mental health and psychological well-being are increasingly important areas of entrepreneurship research. Yet, we do not know enough about how stressors of self-employment affect individuals. Using a longitudinal sample from HILDA (waves 9-15), we investigate the long-term effects of uncertainty and work-family conflict among self-employed and employed workers. We found that for men, self-employment diminishes the psychological well-being of the individual. That effect is mediated through uncertainty, and there were no positive benefits of reduction in work-family conflict. We also found that while uncertainty had a negative effect on women, they did not experience the detrimental effect of self-employment on psychological well-being as severely as men.