Development and validation of a locus of control scale for the entrepreneurship domain

Leon Schjoedt () and Kelly Shaver ()

Small Business Economics, 2012, vol. 39, issue 3, 713-726

Abstract: Locus of control has been extensively examined in entrepreneurship research, but with mixed results. This may be due to measurement issues, such as the widespread use of Rotter’s ( 1966 ) general locus of control scale, which is not domain specific. Not surprisingly, Rotter’s scale has been shown to be multidimensional, including personal efficacy. When the first Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics (PSED I) was constructed in the late 1990s, a measure of locus of control was included. Unfortunately, this scale was also multidimensional. Thus, measurement of the construct may be problematic. Because locus of control continues to be important in organizational research, where it has been found to influence intentions, motivation, satisfaction, and performance, we examined the PSED I dataset to determine whether we could develop a more robust measure after the fact. To this end, we constructed a unidimensional locus of control scale using the sample of nascent entrepreneurs in the PSED I dataset and validated the scale using two additional samples. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, LLC. 2012

Keywords: Entrepreneurs; Locus of control; Scale development; PSED; L26; M1; Y9 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11187-011-9357-0 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:sbusec:v:39:y:2012:i:3:p:713-726

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... 29/journal/11187/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11187-011-9357-0

Access Statistics for this article

Small Business Economics is currently edited by Zoltan J. Acs and David B. Audretsch

More articles in Small Business Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().