Psychological Flexibility for Entrepreneurs: A Validation of the Wishing-Experiencing-Doing Scale

Abstract

Entrepreneurs face high levels of risk and uncertainty on a daily basis. To cope with this, the internal resource “Psychological Flexibility” is put to the foreground. It is a well-known construct from Psychology measuring whether a person is able to adapt to fluctuating situational demands, reconfigure mental resources, shift perspective, and balance competing desires, needs, and life domains. It proved to be positively related to mental health and well-being of individuals, but given that it incorporates repeated interaction between people and their environmental contexts, it does require context-specific measurement instruments. In the Entrepreneurship field, such an instrument is lacking. This study focusses on the development and validation of a Psychological Flexibility measure, tailored to an entrepreneurial context. For this, we applied a rigorous scale development process on a dataset of 875 entrepreneurs. From two studies (study 1, n=532; study 2, n=343), two consecutive formative, multidimensional constructs emerge: A 15-item Wishing, Experiencing and Doing (WED) scale (study 1), and a shorter 6-item measure, the WED-S scale (study 2), appropriate for time-constrained measurement initiatives. Both scales exhibit good psychometric properties and are proven to be reliable and valid measures.