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The decision one makes to engage in entrepreneurial activity is affected by many different motivators. The paper aims to focus on one specific motivator for entrepreneurial activity which is the Need for Achievement. The prevailing methods of studying achievement motivation will also be discussed as shall constructs related to Need for Achievement. The paper also examines the dynamics of achievement motivation. The dynamic ability of individual traits is important, if it were not one's traits would be constant and not capable of being changed or developed. Some of the main factors that can influence achievement motivation are also examined in the paper.

Specifically, data from 249 entrepreneurs from the USA, 220 from China, and 173 from Latvia were used in order to examine the relationships between variables related to Need for Achievement.

Goal orientation, conscientiousness, cognitive complexity, age, and gender were found to be able to account for 29.4 percent of the variance in Need for Achievement among American entrepreneurs, 45.3 percent among Chinese entrepreneurs, and 33.5 percent among Latvian entrepreneurs. Differences are found between the countries with cognitive complexity being statistically significant in the USA and China, but not in Latvia. Gender was significant in the USA and China but not in Latvia. Age was not significantly related to Need for Achievement in any of the three countries, while goal orientation and conscientiousness were significantly related to Need for Achievement in all three countries. Finally, the implications of this research as well as areas that need to be considered for future research are discussed.

The paper is limited to entrepreneurs of small to medium‐sized enterprises in North America, Asia, and the Baltics. The implications of the research include that Need for Achievement is important for entrepreneurs across these three very diverse cultures and that variables related to Need for Achievement vary between the countries. As Need for Achievement is related to economic development, it is important to understand the factors which might be able to influence the Need for Achievement of entrepreneurs from around the world.

The development of entrepreneurs is important if economies desire to have sustainable growth. Little empirical research has examined these issues with data‐sets from three continents. Even less research has examined these issues among entrepreneurs. The paper addresses these areas.

This paper seeks to examine the efficacy of predicting turnover for employees and entrepreneurs from Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania using attitudes towards benefits, pay satisfaction, pay, gender, and age across a four‐year time frame.

A survey that included information on attitudes towards benefits and pay satisfaction was used to collect data from 153 Estonian, 157 Latvian, and 146 Lithuanian employees and 243 Latvian, 103 Estonian, and 109 Lithuanian entrepreneurs. The turnover of the employees and business owners was then followed over a four‐year time period with assessments done each year allowing for an examination of temporal variations in the relationships over time. Actual salary/income data was also obtained from organizational records.

It was found that for the employee samples the classification rates increased slightly as compared to base rates over time (e.g. did better the longer the time period included), while for the employers the classification rates and R² values were relatively flat as compared to base rates. For the employee samples the R² values decreased over time. Attitudes towards benefits were generally significant predictors of turnover for employees and entrepreneurs over a four‐year time period while satisfaction with pay was typically significant for employees but not for entrepreneurs. It was also found that for the employees both equity and expectancy considerations were able to explain differences in turnover rates while for entrepreneurs expectancy theory considerations were more powerful than equity theory explanations.

The research is limited both by geography, job types, and the theoretical construct of turnover. Few studies have examined turnover among both employees and business owners, and few studies have explored the similarities and differences between the two.

Pay and benefits are important for employees. Pay seems to be important for attracting employees while benefits are important for retaining them.

This study examines turnover for both employees and entrepreneurs with a four‐year longitudinal design with data from three different countries – Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Temporal variations in the relationships are also examined on a year by year basis. As employee retention has been an important factor in the Baltic region over the last two decades it is vital to understand how to retain employees.

The purpose of this study is to test the extent to which pay satisfaction is equivalent to perceptions of pay fairness in order to call to attention the need for care in designing instruments in order to lessen the likelihood of the confounding of concepts within measures as has been in numerous previous studies.

Questionnaire data were collected as part of a larger project seeking to understand the customer service behaviors of business owners for four groups of self‐employed business owners from Latvia, Germany, the UK, and the USA.

It is found that while pay satisfaction and pay fairness are not the same construct, with the exception of internal pay comparisons, the self‐employed may not distinguish between pay fairness and pay satisfaction in a meaningful manner.

All four of the samples included in the current study had limited control over their compensation as the economy and industry are the most powerful influences on the income of the self‐employed in small businesses. It might prove useful to examine whether these results hold true for individuals with highly variable compensation.

Organizations should not assume that individuals naturally differentiate between pay fairness and pay satisfaction. It also would appear that there are few differences in the perceptions between the self‐employed based upon country of origin.

While many studies have been performed on pay fairness and pay satisfaction that have assumed that they are distinct constructs, this is the first study to use a multi‐step process in order to systematically and empirically examine the degree to which they are similar. This is done across four countries and with a sample of self‐employed business people – a group rarely examined in human resource research.

The dimensionality of a multi‐dimensional questionnaire – the Attitudes Towards Benefits Scale (ATBS) – was examined using a principal components analysis with an orthogonal rotation and multiple‐group confirmatory factor analysis for a sample of 851 employees of entrepreneurial organizations in the USA. As previously found by Hart and Carraher, it is found that the questionnaire contains three separate dimensions of attitudes towards benefits.

The purpose of this paper is to test the feasibility of using a biodata inventory to measure service‐orientation – one's disposition to be helpful, thoughtful, considerate, and cooperative – across cultures in a sample of 1,324 owners of businesses.

Subjects in Austria, The Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia, Slovakia, and Slovenia are given the inventory in order to predict their on‐the‐job service‐oriented performance.

Within the samples, the service‐orientation ratings are highly correlated with extroversion and openness to experience in all six countries, and agreeableness in five countries and conscientiousness in four countries. The correlations of these scales with service‐orientation are as high as or higher than those generally obtained with measures of service‐orientation with customer service representatives.

The analysis lends credence to the notion that service‐orientation may be effectively measured by biodata within small organizations across multiple cultures.

This paper examines the utility of a personality‐oriented biodata inventory for explaining levels of customer service‐oriented performance across six countries. Little cross‐country research has been done on the owners of business thus this paper helps to fill in gaps in the literature dealing with business owners and the importance of personality attributes to explain service‐oriented performance.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the utility of a selection instrument in predicting service and technologically oriented performance in technologically oriented businesses in mainland China and Japan.

Data was collected from 262 employees in mainland China and 236 employees in Japan pertaining to their service and technology orientations with regard to on‐the‐job performance in a high technology management environment. Employees completed a personality‐oriented employment questionnaire that has been previously examined.

Each dimension predicted performance in both samples, although the structures were not consistent across the two countries. In China, the seven dimensions consist of extroversion, emotional stability, the desire to make good impressions on others, conscientiousness, life satisfaction, performance orientation, and helpfulness. In Japan, the seven dimensions consisted of extroversion, emotional stability, the desire to make good impressions on others, conscientiousness, closed mindedness, empathy, and helpfulness. Results from multiple regression analyses suggested that substantially less of the variance in service‐oriented and technologically oriented performance could be explained in China than in Japan.

Researchers and practitioners alike should be careful when applying surveys developed and validated in western countries because they may not measure the same constructs in China. Further, although countries in Asia share physical proximity, their cultures are so diverse that the utility of such assessments may vary substantially from one country to another.

There is a dearth of empirical research examining on‐the‐job performance in China. This paper, however, adds to the literature by examining high technology businesses in China and demonstrating how their internal processes may differ both from western organizations and those in other Asian cultures.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between demographic and public policy with the entrepreneurial related variables of entrepreneurial orientation, self employment, customer service, and leadership.

Results from 264 first generation expatriate entrepreneurs from Lebanon are used in order to examine the relationships between the variables using a mail questionnaire.

It was found that educational level was important with all of the dependent variables and that the public policy variable of Property Rights was related to entrepreneurial orientation.

The major limitation of the research is that there was range restriction in the dependent variables, likely due to the sample characteristic of them all being expatriate entrepreneurs. The major implications of the study include that additional research should examine the importance of public policy variables with entrepreneurs and the importance of education in encouraging entrepreneurial activities.

Very little research has examined expatriate entrepreneurs and nearly none has examined the relationship between public policy and expatriate entrepreneurship.