Perceived role isolation and work addiction risk among entrepreneurs: associations with perceived business success

Entrepreneurs and business leaders evaluate the condition of their businesses partly through self-referential judgments rather than financial indicators alone. Little is known, however, about how such judgments relate to maladaptive work investment and to the social experience of the leadership role. This study examines associations among work addiction risk, perceived entrepreneurial role isolation, recovery-related leisure time, work passion, and perceived business success.

The evidence comes from a cross-sectional sample of 184 Hungarian entrepreneurs and business leaders, all of whom held an ownership stake in the business they led. Perceived business success was operationalized as a composite of self-rated business performance, revenue growth, and competitor-relative performance. Associations were examined with Spearman correlations, group comparisons, and hierarchical regression models, complemented by robustness checks and bootstrapped indirect-association analyses.

Work addiction risk was negatively associated with perceived business success at the bivariate level and differentiated an adverse functioning profile involving higher stress, burnout exhaustion, and obsessive passion. In multivariate models, however, perceived role isolation was the most consistent correlate of lower perceived business success, whereas work addiction risk was not. The isolation association remained significant across alternative outcome specifications, distress controls, firm-level covariates, and data-screening exclusions. Exploratory analyses supported an indirect association between work addiction risk and perceived business success through role isolation, but not through recovery-related leisure time.

The findings position perceived role isolation as a central psychosocial correlate of business self-evaluation and connect perceived entrepreneurial success research with occupational health psychology. Given the cross-sectional design, all associations are interpreted as non-causal.