Job-related Self-efficacy Measure

Abstract

The Job-related Self-efficacy Measure is a widely utilized psychometric instrument developed by Matt L. Riggs and colleagues to assess an employee’s personal appraisal of their competence, skills, and capability to successfully fulfill their occupational tasks and professional responsibilities. Rooted in Albert Bandura’s social cognitive theory, the scale operationalizes the construct of perceived self-efficacy within specific occupational environments, bridging the gap between broad generalized self-efficacy and hyper-specific task execution metrics. The scale consists of 10 items evaluated on a 7-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (“Strongly Disagree”) to 7 (“Strongly Agree”), incorporating both positively and negatively phrased statements to mitigate acquiescence bias. Psychometric evaluations across diverse organizational, public sector, and industrial samples have consistently demonstrated a robust unidimensional factor structure, high internal consistency reliability (with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients typically ranging from .80 to .88), and exceptional construct validity. The instrument demonstrates expected convergent relationships with generalized self-efficacy, job performance, organizational commitment, and job satisfaction, alongside clear discriminant validity against negative affectivity and distinct theoretical constructs such as job-related outcome expectancies and group-level efficacy. This article provides an exhaustive examination of the scale’s conceptual foundations, psychometric architecture, structural validity, administrative protocols, and empirical utilities across occupational health psychology, industrial-organizational psychology, and human resource management.

Keywords

Job-related Self-efficacy Measure, occupational self-efficacy, social cognitive theory, job performance, psychometrics, workplace assessment, Matt L. Riggs, self-efficacy scale, employee motivation, organizational behavior

Authors

The Job-related Self-efficacy Measure was designed and validated by an influential research group led by Matt L. Riggs, primarily affiliated with the Department of Psychology at California State University, San Bernardino (CSUSB), in collaboration with Patrick A. Knight at Kansas State University, alongside co-researchers Janet Warka, Brenda Babasa, Rocio Betancourt, and Sharon Hooker. Dr. Matt L. Riggs has served as Professor of Psychology and Senior Methodologist, making extensive contributions to psychometrics, structural equation modeling, program evaluation, and organizational behavioral dynamics. Direct academic inquiries and archival document access can be sourced through the institutional repository of California State University, San Bernardino (CSUSB ScholarWorks) or through primary publications in the Journal of Applied Psychology and Educational and Psychological Measurement.

Purpose

The fundamental purpose of the Job-related Self-efficacy Measure is to provide human resource professionals, industrial-organizational psychologists, and organizational researchers with a psychometrically sound, standardized, and robust metric to quantify an individual’s perceived capability to perform work tasks effectively. Within organizational dynamics, understanding how employees evaluate their professional capacities is critical because self-efficacy beliefs govern how much effort individuals will expend, how long they will persevere when confronting workplace obstacles, and how resilient they will remain during systemic workplace restructuring or technological disruption.

Prior to the introduction of this instrument by Riggs and colleagues in 1994, organizational researchers faced a methodological dichotomy. On one end were generalized self-efficacy scales, such as the Generalized Self-Efficacy Scale developed by Ralf Schwarzer and Matthias Jerusalem, which captured broad, trait-like optimism and agency across life domains. While valuable for clinical and general wellness studies, general scales often lacked predictive power regarding domain-specific performance in work contexts. On the other end were hyper-specific task inventories (such as typing speed efficacy or software coding efficacy) designed according to strict micro-level task analyses. While statistically predictive of narrow operational behaviors, such scales could not be generalized across job roles, team boundaries, or distinct organizational departments.

The Job-related Self-efficacy Measure resolved this limitation by establishing a mid-range, domain-specific level of measurement. It evaluates self-competence at the comprehensive job level, rendering it adaptable across diverse vocations (e.g., manufacturing, clinical healthcare, administrative support, software engineering, and educational leadership). In practical settings, the scale is routinely implemented in employee selection validation, training needs assessments, onboarding evaluations, leadership development programs, and occupational stress diagnostics. In academic research, it serves as a central variable in causal structural equation models examining turnover intentions, burnout, burnout mediation, organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs), and the interaction between individual efficacy and team-level collective efficacy.

Psychological Construct

The core psychological construct measured by this instrument is domain-specific occupational self-efficacy. Self-efficacy does not refer to an individual’s objective skill inventory or cognitive capacity; rather, it reflects a subjective judgment of what an individual can accomplish with whatever skills they possess under varying workplace contingencies. Within the Job-related Self-efficacy Measure, this construct is conceptualized as a cohesive, unifactorial continuum of subjective job-level agency, anchored by several operational indicators:

• Belief in Fundamental Capability: The baseline cognitive conviction that one has the requisite talent, baseline competence, and cognitive adaptability to successfully carry out assigned occupational duties (e.g., Item 1: “I have confidence in my ability to do my job”).
• Perceived Skill Deficiencies and Limitations: Evaluated through inversely scored items that assess the recognition or fear of professional inadequacy, specifically acknowledging whether an employee believes certain job tasks are beyond their current mastery (e.g., Item 2: “There are some tasks required by my job that I cannot do well”).
• Internal Attributions of Failure: The degree to which poor work outcomes or operational failures are internalized and attributed strictly to an immutable lack of personal ability rather than external systemic factors, insufficient resources, or shifting demands (e.g., Item 3: “When my performance is poor, it is due to my lack of ability”).
• Self-Doubt and Career Foreshortening: A chronic sense of imposter feelings or vulnerability regarding one’s future occupational viability due to presumed skill deficits (e.g., Item 4: “I doubt my ability to do my job”; Item 8: “My future in this job is limited because of my lack of skills”).
• Social Comparison and Peer Competence Appraisals: The evaluation of one’s own competence relative to coworkers and industry peers, capturing feelings of occupational inferiority or superiority (e.g., Item 6: “Most people in my line of work can do this job better than I can”).
• Subjective Mastery and Occupational Pride: High-end assertions of vocational mastery, pride in specialized expertise, and confidence when executing tasks under social evaluation or direct managerial observation (e.g., Item 7: “I am an expert at my job”; Item 9: “I am very proud of my job skills and abilities”; Item 10: “I feel threatened when others watch me work”).

Theoretical Framework

The foundational bedrock of the Job-related Self-efficacy Measure is Social Cognitive Theory, formulated and refined by Albert Bandura (1977, 1986, 1997). Central to this theoretical architecture is the model of triadic reciprocal causation, which posits that human behavior, personal cognitive factors, and environmental influences operate as interacting determinants that influence each other bidirectionally. Within this paradigm, self-efficacy is posited as the central cognitive mechanism governing human agency.

Bandura conceptualized efficacy beliefs as arising from four primary informational sources: enactive mastery experiences, vicarious experiences, verbal/social persuasion, and physiological or affective states. In occupational settings, enactive mastery represents an employee’s historical track record of successful task execution. Successes build a robust belief in one’s personal efficacy, whereas repeated failures undermine it, especially before a firm sense of efficacy is established. The Job-related Self-efficacy Measure captures the integrated cognitive evaluation that employees construct after synthesizing these informational inputs across their daily working lives.

Furthermore, Riggs and colleagues carefully distinguished self-efficacy expectations (the belief that one can successfully execute the behavior required to produce outcomes) from outcome expectations (an individual’s estimate that a given behavior will lead to certain organizational or personal outcomes, such as promotion, bonus, or termination). Early psychological scales often conflated efficacy with expectations of success or reward. Riggs et al. (1994) developed this instrument specifically to isolate self-efficacy beliefs from outcome expectancy beliefs, demonstrating through structural modeling that while efficacy expectations directly regulate performance effort and self-regulation, outcome expectations operate downstream, moderating affective engagement, job satisfaction, and turnover propensity.

In addition, Riggs and Knight (1994) positioned the scale within a socio-technical multilevel framework, evaluating the interaction between personal job-related self-efficacy and collective group-related efficacy. According to this framework, an individual’s performance beliefs do not exist in isolation; they are continuously calibrated against the perceived competence of the work group, team feedback loops, and attributional processes that interpret organizational success and failure.

Validity

The Job-related Self-efficacy Measure has undergone extensive psychometric validation, establishing exceptional construct, convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related validity across varied industrial, commercial, and educational environments.

Construct and Factorial Validity

In the original validation studies conducted by Riggs, Warka, Babasa, Betancourt, and Hooker (1994), exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses supported a primary general factor accounting for the majority of common variance. Item factor loadings systematically exceeded .45, with primary loadings concentrated between .52 and .81. Cross-validation across multiple occupational samples confirmed that the single-factor job-efficacy model provided a superior fit compared to multidimensional artifacts produced by method variance.

Convergent Validity

Convergent validity has been repeatedly established by correlating the measure with theoretically aligned constructs. The scale demonstrates statistically significant positive correlations with Generalized Self-Efficacy (ranging from r = .40 to .55), subjective and objective job performance metrics (r = .25 to .42), job involvement (r = .34 to .48), organizational commitment (r = .30 to .45), and job satisfaction (r = .35 to .50). These correlations align precisely with theoretical predictions: individuals who perceive themselves as highly capable in their occupational roles typically manifest higher job engagement, stronger vocational identity, and superior performance outputs.

Discriminant Validity

Riggs et al. (1994) verified that the Job-related Self-efficacy Measure is empirically distinguishable from related but distinct psychological constructs. Specifically, confirmatory factor analyses of models containing both personal job-efficacy and job-related outcome expectancies demonstrated that a two-factor model demonstrated a significantly better fit than a single-factor nested model (Δχ² test, p < .001). Furthermore, the scale exhibited low to non-significant correlations with generalized negative affectivity, social desirability scales, and locus of control, demonstrating that the instrument does not merely mirror an individual’s dispositional mood or tendency to offer socially approved answers.

Criterion and Predictive Validity

In longitudinal and experimental paradigms, such as research on task feedback by Fogg (1995) and subsequent organizational studies, baseline scores on the Job-related Self-efficacy Measure predicted employee persistence under failure feedback, successful mastery of new workplace technologies, and supervisor performance appraisals collected months later. Employees reporting elevated job self-efficacy exhibited significantly lower levels of workplace cynicism, emotional exhaustion, and voluntary turnover intentions.

Reliability

The reliability of the Job-related Self-efficacy Measure has been established across multiple empirical studies, consistently satisfying the standards for research and applied diagnostic applications.

Internal Consistency Reliability

In the foundational scale development study by Riggs, Warka, Babasa, Betancourt, and Hooker (1994), Cronbach’s alpha coefficients for the 10-item scale across diverse employee cohorts were reported at α = .86 in Sample 1 (N = 272 university staff and municipal employees) and α = .88 in Sample 2 (N = 314 diverse occupational workers). In the subsequent investigation by Riggs and Knight (1994), internal consistency was re-confirmed with an alpha coefficient of α = .85. Subsequent field studies using the measure across varying organizational contexts have consistently reported alpha estimates spanning from .80 to .89, demonstrating that the 10 items possess high internal coherence and low standard error of measurement.

Test-Retest Stability

Test-retest reliability evaluations conducted across intervals ranging from two to six weeks have revealed stability coefficients between r = .74 and r = .82 in stable organizational environments where no major structural, technological, or managerial disruptions occurred. When specific skill-enhancement interventions, targeted training programs, or sudden systemic workplace shocks take place, the scale appropriately captures shifts in self-efficacy, confirming both temporal stability and sensitivity to true behavioral change.

Factor Analysis

During initial scale development, Riggs et al. (1994) subjected an initial pool of candidate items to rigorous exploratory factor analysis (EFA) utilizing principal components analysis and principal axis factoring with both orthogonal (Varimax) and oblique (Promax) rotations. Scree plot inspections, eigenvalues-greater-than-one rules, and parallel analyses consistently identified a single primary factor underlying the 10 job-related self-efficacy items, accounting for approximately 42% to 49% of the total variance across validation samples.

Subsequent confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) tested the unidimensional model against alternative specifications. While an unconstrained CFA occasionally exhibits minor method artifacts attributable to the presence of both positively and negatively keyed items, models incorporating a single substantive job-efficacy factor with orthogonal method effects (or correlated error terms among negatively worded items) achieve excellent goodness-of-fit indices across published studies:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): .94 to .97
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): .93 to .96
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): .045 to .062 (90% CI [.032, .074])
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): .038 to .051

Standardized factor loadings across studies remain consistently robust: Item 1 (.74), Item 2 (.58), Item 3 (.52), Item 4 (.76), Item 5 (.79), Item 6 (.65), Item 7 (.68), Item 8 (.64), Item 9 (.71), and Item 10 (.54). Every item loads significantly (p < .001) onto the underlying latent occupational self-efficacy dimension.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Job-related Self-efficacy Measure
• Alternative Names: Personal Job-Related Self-Efficacy Scale, Riggs Job Self-Efficacy Scale
• Primary Authors: Matt L. Riggs, Janet Warka, Brenda Babasa, Rocio Betancourt, and Sharon Hooker (1994); Matt L. Riggs and Patrick A. Knight (1994)
• Construct Assessed: Individual perceived self-efficacy and task competence in an occupational role
• Target Population: Adult employees, working professionals, managers, and organizational personnel across all sectors
• Administration Format: Self-administered paper-and-pencil or computerized questionnaire
• Number of Items: 10 items
• Response Scale: 7-point Likert response scale:
  • 1 = Strongly Disagree
  • 2 = Disagree
  • 3 = Slightly Disagree
  • 4 = Neutral
  • 5 = Slightly Agree
  • 6 = Agree
  • 7 = Strongly Agree
• Scoring Protocol:
  • Positively Keyed Items: Items 1, 5, 7, and 9 are scored directly as marked (1 = 1, 2 = 2, 3 = 3, 4 = 4, 5 = 5, 6 = 6, 7 = 7).
  • Negatively Keyed Items (Reverse-Coded): Items 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, and 10 must be reverse-scored prior to calculating composite scores (1 → 7, 2 → 6, 3 → 5, 4 → 4, 5 → 3, 6 → 2, 7 → 1).
  • Total Score Calculation: Sum or mean of all 10 items after reverse-scoring. Total sum ranges from 10 to 70; mean composite scores range from 1.00 to 7.00.
  • Interpretation: Higher aggregate scores indicate stronger subjective self-efficacy and perceived capability regarding one’s occupational duties.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Job-related Self-efficacy Measure was originally developed and published in 1994 in academic journals copyrighted by the American Psychological Association (APA) and SAGE Publications (on behalf of Educational and Psychological Measurement). The scale items are widely considered non-commercial assessment instruments made accessible by the authors for non-profit academic, scholarly, thesis, and pedagogical research without royalty fees. Researchers are expected to appropriately cite the original validation publications (Riggs & Knight, 1994; Riggs et al., 1994). Organizations, human resource consultancies, or commercial testing entities planning to incorporate the instrument into proprietary, commercialized diagnostic platforms, for-profit assessment suites, or fee-charging enterprise software should review fair use guidelines or obtain formal written permission from the copyright holders and publishers.

References

Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2), 191–215. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.84.2.191

Bandura, A. (1986). Social foundations of thought and action: A social cognitive theory. Prentice-Hall.

Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. W. H. Freeman.

Fogg, R. J. (1995). The effects of feedback and strategy on self-efficacy and computer task performance (Master’s thesis). California State University, San Bernardino. CSUSB ScholarWorks Theses Digitization Project. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project/1023

Riggs, M. L., & Knight, P. A. (1994). The impact of perceived group success-failure on motivational beliefs and attitudes: A causal model. Journal of Applied Psychology, 79(5), 755–766. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.79.5.755

Riggs, M. L., Warka, J., Babasa, B., Betancourt, R., & Hooker, S. (1994). Development and validation of self-efficacy and outcome expectancy scales for job-related applications. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 54(3), 793–802. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013164494054003026

Schwarzer, R., & Jerusalem, M. (1995). Generalized Self-Efficacy scale. In J. Weinman, S. Wright, & M. Johnston (Eds.), Measures in health psychology: A user’s portfolio. Causal and control beliefs (pp. 35–37). NFER-NELSON.

Items of the Scale