Assessment of Eight Entrepreneurial Personality Dimensions: Validity Evidence of the BEPE Battery

Abstract

Background: The study of entrepreneurial activity has undergone intense development in recent decades. Traditionally this topic has been addressed from three approaches: economic, sociological and psychological. In the study of enterprising personality, two fundamental perspectives stand out: the use of general personality traits, like the Big Five, and the use of more specific traits related to entrepreneurial spirit, such as self-efficacy, autonomy, innovation, optimism, and others. The objective of this study is to provide validity evidence for a new instrument for measuring eight specific dimensions of entrepreneurial personality (BEPE).Methods: The sample was composed of 1,170 adults from the general population (59.9% women). The average age was 42.34 years with a standard deviation of 12.96. Of the sample, 13% were self-employed. Internal factorial structure and reliability of BEPE were examined. The relationships with other variables and the discriminative capacity of the BEPE between different groups of workers were analyzed.Results: First order exploratory factor analyses show the essential unidimensionality of each of the eight proposed sub-scales, with factorial weights ranging between 0.341 and 0.825. In the Confirmatory Factor Analysis, the best fit was achieved with a Bifactor model. With regards to reliability, the eight BEPE sub-scales gave high alpha coefficient values, between 0.81 and 0.89, as did the total battery (0.97). BEPE sub-scales show a high canonical correlation with the Big Five personality factors (0.796) and with the sub-scales of the Measure of Entrepreneurial Talents and Abilities questionnaire (0.779).Conclusion: The BEPE questionnaire for the evaluation of the eight fundamental specific dimensions of the entrepreneurial personality presents adequate psychometric properties. Its relationships with other measures of personality traits are in line with what is expected. Therefore, the BEPE is a new measurement instrument that can be used with confidence both in the applied field and in research.

The impact of organizational structure and work autonomy in fostering entrepreneurial tendencies and job performance

“…Previous studies have demonstrated the scale to have good internal consistency STRUCTURE AND AUTONOMY IN JOB PERFORMANCE 11 (Leutner et al, 2014), and in the present study all four subscales had internal consistencies above α = .76 (see Table 1). META is the most widely accepted measure of entrepreneurial tendencies in the literature (Cuesta, Suárez-Álvarez, Lozano, García-Cueto, & Muñiz, 2018).…”

Development of a computerized adaptive test to assess entrepreneurial personality

“…The development process of the CAT used the following process (Muñiz & Fonseca-Pedrero, 2019). A team of eight experts in Psychometrics constructed an initial bank of 161 items, in Spanish, designed to measure the eight specific facets defining entrepreneurial personality: self-efficacy, autonomy, innovation, internal locus of control, achievement motivation, optimism, stress tolerance, and risk-taking (Cuesta et al, 2018;Rauch & Frese, 2007). For an item to be selected, all members of the expert group had to agree on its content.…”

“…The BEPE (Cuesta et al, 2018) is a battery made up of 80 items and measures eight dimensions (10 items per dimension): self-efficacy, autonomy, innovation, internal locus of control, achievement motivation, optimism, stress tolerance, and risk-taking. These eight dimensions combine to a common factor of entrepreneurial personality.…”

Antecedentes exitosos propios – valor añadido para la educación superior en Colombia

“…Se han utilizado múltiples constructos de gran relevancia para poder comprender los resultados de aprendizaje, académicos y niveles de grado y logro. Enunciemos algunos de ellos que podrán ser incluidos en el muestreo de la investigación: la motivación de logro (ej., atribuciones), la autoeficacia percibida, las actitudes, las características personales, los estilos de aprendizaje y de pensamiento, el uso de estrategias, factores de inteligencia emocional, los procesos de autorregulación, entre otros, lo que permite contrastar con muchos estudios internacionales recientes en el campo, incluyendo estudios internacionales de comparación con muestras colombianas (Cheng & Lin, 2018;Cuesta et al, 2018;Díaz & García, 2016;Fang et al, 2017;García-Martín & García-Sánchez, 2017;Habok & Magyar, 2017;Mnez-Ferrer et al, 2018;Nie et al, 2017;Oriol et al, 2018;Puente et al, 2018;Robledo & García, 2018;Romera et al, 2018, Sinval et al, 2018Widlund et al, 2017). En una revisión reciente, en que se revisan todas las intervenciones pedagógicas con enfoque en la autorregulación, implementadas en China durante las últimas dos décadas, de 603 estudios, sólo pudieron incluirse en los análisis 59, y de ellos se identifican solo cuatro estudios cuasi-experimentales, frente al resto de registro de experiencias (Li, Ye, Tang, Zhou, Hu, 2018), lo que confirma el estado general a nivel, no solo de Colombia o de USA, sino generalizado, por lo que la justificación de esta investigación y con la metodología prevista, es una opción con potencial heurístico, de contribución teórica y aplicada.…”