Does an entrepreneur run the risk of developing stress due to unsuitability as an entrepreneur? Validation of an entrepreneurship scale

BACKGROUND: Self-employed workers have largely been missing from research in work and occupational health. There are hardly any questionnaires that measure the specific problems and stressors of the self-employed. Recently the Work and Well-Being Inventory (WBI) (in Dutch: VAR-2) was normal and validated for the self-employed. However, a scale that measures the suitability as an entrepreneur was still lacking. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to assess the psychometric properties of a new developed WBI-scale for self-employed workers (entrepreneurs) to assess the suitability as an entrepreneur. METHODS: The new developed entrepreneurship scale consisted of 15 items divided among 4 subscales: entrepreneurial attitude (4 items), management skills (3 items), entrepreneurial resilience (5 items), and financial health (3 items). We conducted a cross-sectional study, including 676 self-employed workers (business owners, liberal professions, and medical practitioners). Data was used to calculate the test-retest reliability, construct validity, concurrent validity, and incremental validity. Concurrent validity was calculated against external measures of stress and job demands. RESULTS: Business owners obtained the highest mean score on the entrepreneurship scale, followed by liberal professions and medical practitioners. Cronbach's alpha was good for the full scale and sufficient for two subscales. Confirmatory factor analyses showed an excellent fit of the bi-factor model. We found a negative correlation between the entrepreneurship scale and the external measures of stress and job demands. CONCLUSIONS: The new developed entrepreneurship scale provides a good reliable and valid instrument to assess psychosocial risks factors in self-employed workers. The scale can help medical advisors to assess psychosocial risk factors that make self-employed workers at risk of work disability or sickness absence. More research is needed to investigate the predictive validity of the scale.