Is General Self-Efficacy a Universal Construct?1

Summary Perceived self-efficacy represents an optimistic sense of personal competence that seems to be a pervasive phenomenon accounting for motivation and accomplishments in human beings. The General Self-Efficacy scale, developed to measure this construct at the broadest level, has been adapted to many languages. The psychometric properties of this instrument is examined among 19,120 participants from 25 countries. The main research question is whether the measure is configurally equivalent across cultures, that is, whether it corresponds to only one dimension. The findings confirm this assumption and suggest the globality of the underlying construct. They also point to a number of cross-cultural differences that merit further investigation.