New General Self-Efficacy Scale (NGSE)

The seven NGSE items Chen and Gully (1997) had found to be distinct from the SGSE scale and self-esteem. Because the authors wanted to ensure that the content domain of GSE would be well captured by the NGSE scale, they created seven additional NGSE items, intending to eliminate redundancies later. Consistent with procedures employed by Chen and Gully, when wording the new items authors carefully referred to Eden’s GSE conceptualization, which is consistent with definitions provided by other researchers (Gardner & Pierce, 1998; Judge et al., 1997; Judge, Erez, et al.,1998). Each of the first two authors independently generated between three and five new items. The authors combined the items and rewrote or eliminated any that were poorly worded, were clear duplicates, or seemed inconsistent with our GSE definition. The third author then reviewed the items for clarity, consistency with theory, and redundancy. This effort yielded a total of 14 NGSE items, 7 of which were new and 7 carried over from Chen and Gully’s study. The NGSE scale was scored on a 5-point Likert-type scale from strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (5).