Propensity to entrepreneurship and its antecedents: development and validation of a measurement scale

Abstract

Abstract This article develops and validates a Measurement Scale of the Propensity to Entrepreneurship and its Antecedents (MSPEA). The theoretical basis concerns the Propensity to Entrepreneurship and the previous individual characteristics (innovative behavior, need for autonomy, need for achievement, proactivity, self-efficacy, locus of internal/external control, tolerance/intolerance to ambiguity, risk propensity, and risk aversion). The methodological procedures involved the qualitative (selection of individual characteristics and elaboration of items) and quantitative approaches through multivariate data analysis. The results reveal that all constructs meet the necessary parameters for performing Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA). After reduction, all presented good reliability with Cronbach’s alpha greater than 0.70, indicating that all MSPEA constructs are statistically reliable. In the final version, 56 items remained, 9 of which were of Propensity to Entrepreneurship and 47 of individual characteristics. The elaboration of items to measure the propensity to entrepreneurship and the identification of a set of individual characteristics preceding it expands the understanding of this theme since several studies did not measure it as a construct, which is the main contribution of this study. Considering that EFA is an interdependence technique in which factors are formed to show the explanatory power of a set of variables, not allowing one or more factors to be considered predictors of another factor, future research could perform the Confirmatory Factor Analysis proposing a model of how these antecedent individual characteristics can be directly or indirectly related to the Propensity to Entrepreneurship.