The Use of Time Perspective to Prevent Entrepreneurial Burnout

Since, entrepreneurs’ reward-effort-imbalance is based on the perception of entrepreneurs, the time perspective was added to the ERI model in order to test how a high future time perspective might help to prevent burnout. ERI is caused by perceived high effort but low reward. Yet ERI leads to burnout among entrepreneurs. That has an negative effect on entrepreneurs mental health and performance. A critical literature review was conducted to check if entrepreneurs’ strong future time perspective could prevent burnout by the ability to accept low reward in the present and skipping immediate reward for the sake of future reward. Therefore the time perspectives were measured by ZTPI and burnout was measured by MBI. In addition, twelve semi structured interviews with student entrepreneurs were conducted to test how time perspectives influence the development of entrepreneurial burnout. The literature review supported the hypothesis, but the high future time perspective scores didn’t correlate with low burnout scores. The results of the semi structured interview couldn’t show that either. However, some support was found that student entrepreneurs with a higher preference of future reward had lower burnout scores than student entrepreneurs who preferred immediate reward. The results showed that time perspectives did affect the development of burnout among entrepreneurs: It showed that preferring immediate reward more than future reward leads to higher burnout risk. However, most results are not significant nor are the results generalizable.