Personal Initiative in the Small Business: The Role of Self-efficacy and Control at Work

摘要

Personal initiative (PI) is one of the most important aspects of entrepreneur's innovation. Although numerous studies have investigated the effect of PI on firms' performance, there has been little research directed at the internal mechanism between PI and performance. Personal initiative is a behavior syndrome resulting in an individual's taking an active, persistent and self-starting approach to work and going beyond what is formally required in a given situation. Literature also shows that PI is meaningfully related to a nomological network of variables, based on personality variables; orientation and work environment. Many previous researches revealed that personal initiative positively influences the performance. In this study, we are motivated by the idea to study how the personal initiative influences the performance. Hence, we simultaneously adopted PI as independent variable, and empirically examined the mediator roles of control at work and self-efficacy, as we believe it will help us to understand how PI facilitates performance. Data was collected from full-time employees of small scale enterprises in southeast of China. A cross-sector questionnaire-based study of 358 employees was used. We combined the data from five representative industries which are the manufacturing sector (100), high-tech sector (47), service sector (72), finance sector (51) and trade sector (88).In the stage of data analysis, we tested the hypothesis that whether the variables of control at work and self-efficacy mediate the relation between PI and performance. It was found that the relation between PI and performance is fully mediated by self-efficacy, as well as the control at work. The results of this study give us some theoretical implications. It showed that the positive effect of PI on performance can not be attained without the role of control at work and self-efficacy, which hints researchers to pay more attention to the motivational factors and the characteristics of the work. From a practical perspective, the result of this study provided specific evidence for the business owners to believe that redesigning the work and selecting the proactive employees is a good investment which will enhance the competitiveness of the organization.