Starflict · Conflicts in start-ups: coping with stress and conflicts to promote well-being and entrepreneurial success

Conflicts in start-ups: coping with stress and conflicts to promote well-being and entrepreneurial success

• What is the problem/issue being addressed? Start-ups are considered the Europe 2020 Priorities to strengthen Europe’s economic and job growth. Keeping with the Small Business Act (SBA) principles, the EC Entrepreneurship Action Plan aims at supporting entrepreneurs in creating new businesses and ensuring more supportive environments for start-ups, so they can thrive and grow. Despite the success stories of the transformative power of startups and large investment into fostering start-ups’ creation and entrepreneurship in incubators, about 50% of new European businesses fail during their first five years. Post-mortem testimonies of failed startups indicate conflicts between founders and effects of work stress as two of the top reasons for this failure. However, the antecedents of start-ups’ failure and entrepreneurial success are largely under-studied. • Why is it important for society? Start-ups as other small businesses are particularly vulnerable to high levels of work stress, and poor working conditions. One of the most important hindrances to health and well-being is stress, strongly connected to the experience of conflicts at work. Although start-ups’ founders burst with enthusiasm and see their start-ups as full of challenges, start-ups are an extremely fertile ground for conflicts and hindering distress which are costly and even can be deadly. Work stress often provokes sleep deficiency that goes hand in hand with poor mental health and performance, frequent cardiovascular diseases, and even death that all cost Europe €617 billion annually. However, research on the issue of conflict and stress in start-ups is scarce. With this in mind, understanding how to maintain well-being and promote quality of working life, while working efficiently and effectively is an important goal for society and economy. • What are the overall objectives? The general objective of STARFLICT was to elaborate a typology of conflicts in start-ups, develop an assessment tool for conflicts in start-ups, identify early indicators of start-up’s gain- and loss- spirals that lead to well-being and entrepreneurial success, and offer practical guidelines for start-ups on how to effectively deal with conflicts and stress using individual (e.g., reducing sleep deprivation) and group-level coping strategies.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз