Ronald F. Inglehart Laboratory for Comparative Social Research announces the next regular seminar, which will be held as a Zoom session on May, 20 at 16-30 p.m. (GMT+3). Maria Kravtsova (LCSR HSE) and Irina Levina (ICSID) will deliver a report “Individual Locus of Control and Innovativeness”.

A link to Zoom session is available by request via lcsr.event@hse.ru.

Is higher locus of control – the extent to which individuals believe they control their lives and the environment – always good for economic outcomes? In this paper, we explore the effect of individual locus of control on innovativeness as measured by performing creative tasks at work and the ability to behave not as others expect from you.

While the literature suggests that a higher locus of control is associated with better economic outcomes, in this paper we assume that the relationship between locus of control and innovativeness might be non-linear: excessive locus of control might prevent innovations. Individuals with too high levels of locus of control tend to withdraw from risky non-traditional behaviour because in case of failure they would have no chance to shift the blame on somebody else. Therefore, exploring new solutions might be emotionally very costly for people with a high locus of control.

Next, we argue that in a weak institutional environment these “side effects” of excessive locus of control are more pronounced. By underdeveloped institutions with a high level of uncertainty personal effort does not always result in a positive outcome for uncontrollable reasons. Therefore, risky innovative behaviour becomes even more costly for those individuals who take responsibility for their failures.

We test our hypotheses using the 5th and 6th waves of the World Values Survey. Institutional quality is proxied by the Rule of Law Index from the Worldwide Governmental Indicators provided by the World Bank. Our preliminary results suggest, that both hypotheses get empirical support: (a) the relationship between individual locus of control and innovativeness has an inverted U-shaped form; (b) the threshold value of locus of control after which individuals start reverting back to routine tasks at work and traditional behaviour is lower in countries with weaker institutions.

Everyone interested is invited!

The working language is English.