An examination of the relationship between manager self-efficacy and entrepreneurial intentions and performance in mexican small businesses

Resumen

Self-efficacy refers to the subjective beliefs that people have of their capability to perform a given task, a topic of continual research in the last two decades in different fields of human functioning. There is ample research about the relationship between self-efficacy and performance, and with entrepreneurship. Chen et al. (1998) in particular proposed a construct to predict the likelihood of an individual being an entrepreneur, which they tested in parallel samples of students and small business owners and executives; the construct consisted of five factors: marketing, innovation, management, risk-taking, and financial control. The present study was meant to validate the construct in a sample of small businesses in a small city of west-central Mexico, but results found show that the data converge in three factors that seem to relate to the difficulty and complexity of the task; such factors explain the business perceived performance, as well as the entrepreneurial intention of business owners and managers.