Latent profiles of personality, temperament, and eudaimonic well-being: Comparing life satisfaction and health outcomes among entrepreneurs and employees

Considerable research finds that entrepreneurs enjoy higher subjective well-being than wage-earning employees. At the same time, entrepreneurship is uniquely stressful for founders, who generally have high levels of personal commitment to the business and often higher workloads than wage employees. This highlights a tension in entrepreneurship research where it is unclear how self-employment influences well-being. This research seeks to resolve some existing tensions by tackling complex constellations of well-being profiles among both entrepreneurs and wage employees. Our latent profile analysis and commentary suggest the multifaceted nature of self-employment experiences, straddling both personal and business goals that may not always be hedonic, as an important consideration for future research on entrepreneurial well-being. •Do entrepreneurs experience greater health and well-being than wage employees? It depends.•The idea that entrepreneurs experience both higher and lower well-being highlights a “black box” of entrepreneurial well-being.•We propose latent profiles that help shed light into the black box, profiles that may drive the realization of well-being.•Using samples from Portugal and the United States, we unpack these underexplored latent profiles between entrepreneurs and wage employees.•The latent profiles uncovered in this study demonstrate that health and well-being are a kaleidoscopic combination of factors.