The psychological costs of owning and managing an SME: Linking job stressors, occupational loneliness, entrepreneurial orientation, and burnout

• A moderated mediation model is proposed to investigate burnout in SME owner-managers.
• Results showed that job stressors predict burnout through a feeling of occupational loneliness.
• This conditional indirect effect was stronger and significant when entrepreneurial orientation is low, but weaker and not significant when entrepreneurial orientation is high.
• Findings provide a starting point for further investigations of burnout in SME owner-managers.

The aim of this study was to gain a deeper understanding of occupational stress in small-to-medium enterprise (SMEs) owner-managers by delving further into individual and contextual factors that make them vulnerable to burnout. From a relational perspective, the authors propose that job stressors related to SME management can predict burnout through the feeling of occupational loneliness, and that this indirect relationship is moderated by the entrepreneurial orientation of the owner-manager. The proposed moderated mediation model was supported by multiwave data collected from 377 owner-managers in France as well as its invariance across business size. The results showed that the conditional indirect effect of loneliness was stronger and significant when entrepreneurial orientation is low, but weaker and not significant when entrepreneurial orientation is high. This finding provides a starting point for further investigations of burnout in SME owner-managers, and more specifically, the complex pathways by which job stressors are related to burnout.