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Entrepreneurship is a major factor in the national economy; thus, it is important to understand the motivational characteristics spurring people to become entrepreneurs and why some are more successful than others. In this study, we conducted a meta-analysis of the relationship between achievement motivation and variables associated with entrepreneurial behavior. We found that achievement motivation was significantly correlated with both choice of an entrepreneurial career and entrepreneurial performance. Further, we found that both projective and self-report measures of achievement motivation were valid. Finally, known group studies yielded a higher validity coefficient than did individual difference studies.

Employee attitude data from 35 companies over 8 years were analyzed at the organizational level of analysis against financial (return on assets; ROA) and market performance (earnings per share; EPS) data using lagged analyses permitting exploration of priority in likely causal ordering. Analyses revealed statistically significant and stable relationships across various time lags for 3 of 7 scales. Overall Job Satisfaction and Satisfaction With Security were predicted by ROA and EPS more strongly than the reverse (although some of the reverse relationships were also significant); Satisfaction With Pay suggested a more reciprocal relationship with ROA and EPS. The discussion of results provides a preliminary framework for understanding issues surrounding employee attitudes, high-performance work practices, and organizational financial and market performance.We report on a study of the relationship between employee attitudes and performance with both variables indexed at the organizational level of analysis. The majority of the research on employee attitudes (e.g., job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and job involvement) has explored the attitude-performance relationship at the individual level of analysis. This is somewhat odd because the study of employee attitudes had much of its impetus in the 1960s when scholars such as Argyris (1957), Likert (1961), andMcGregor (1960) proposed that the way employees experience their work world would be reflected in organizational effectiveness. Unfortunately, these hypotheses were typically studied by researchers taking an explicitly micro-orientation and they translated these hypotheses into studies of individual attitudes and individual performance without exploring the organizational consequences of those individual attitudes (Nord & Fox, 1996;Schneider, 1985). To demonstrate how ingrained this individually based research model is, consider the research reported by F. J. Smith (1977). Smith tested the hypothesis that attitudes are most reflected in behavior when a crisis or critical situation emerges. He tested this hypothesis on a day when there was a blizzard in Chicago but not in New York and examined the relationship between aggregated department level employee attitudes and absenteeism rates for those departments. The results indicated a statistically stronger relationship in Chicago between aggregated department employee attitudes and department absenteeism rates than in New York, but Smith apologized for failure to test the hypothesis at the individual level of analysis.Research conducted under the rubric of organizational climate represents an exception to this individual-level bias. In climate research, there has been some success in aggregating individual employee perceptions and exploring their relationship to meaningful organizational (or unit-level) criteria. For example, an early study by Zohar (1980) showed that aggregated employee perceptions of safety climate are reflected in safety records for Israeli firms, and Schneider, Parkington, and Buxton ...

Statistical issues associated with multilevel data are becoming increasingly important to organizational researchers. This paper concentrates on the issue of assessing the factor structure of a construct at aggregate levels of analysis. Specifically, we describe a recently developed procedure for performing multilevel confirmatory factor analysis (MCFA) [Muthen, B.O. (1990). Mean and covariance structure analysis of hierarchical data. Paper presented at the Psychometric Society, Princeton, NJ; Muthen, B.O. (1994). Multilevel covariance structure analysis. Sociological Methods and Research, 22,, and provide an illustrative example of its application to leadership data reflecting both the organizational and societal level of analysis. Overall, the results of our illustrative analysis support the existence of a valid societal-level leadership construct, and show the potential of this multilevel confirmatory factor analysis procedure for leadership research and the field of I/O psychology in general.

This paper explains why GLOBE used a set of cultural values and practices to measure national cultures. We show why there is no theoretical or empirical basis for Hofstede's criticism that GLOBE measures of values are too abstract or for his contention that national and organizational cultures are phenomena of different order. We also show why Hofstede has a limited understanding of the relationship between national wealth and culture. Furthermore, we explain why Hofstede's reanalysis of the GLOBE data is inappropriate and produces incomprehensible results. We also show the validity of managerial samples in studying leadership. Finally, we explain why Hofstede's claim that GLOBE instruments reflect researchers psycho-logic reveals ignorance of psychometric methodologies designed to ensure scale reliability and construct validity. Journal of International Business Studies (2006) 37, 897–914. doi:10.1057/palgrave.jibs.8400234

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