A scale with 28 items, the Organizational Locus of Control (ELCO), was built based on Rotter’s theory and Levenson’s scale. ELCO was validated on a sample of 350 employees of Telebrás, a governmental firm in Brazil. As foreseen from the theory, a principal-axis factoring showed the presence of the expected two factors, namely internal and external locus of control. The external locus of control factor, composed of 18 items, showed good internal consistency (alpha =.81) whereas the internal factor, with 10 items, still lacks consistency (alpha =.66). With the same data, a study of Telebrás employees’ locus of control was performed. The most striking finding was that the level of internality falls with schooling (high school graduates vs. University graduates), as well as with the amount of professional experience. The surprising results were interpreted in terms of the peculiar period that this public firm is undergoing, namely, of becoming a private enterprise. This situation seems to have induced the employees to a general loss of trust in their own competency, which is mostly felt by those who are intellectually more sophisticated and have a longer career experience. Also, the theory of locus of control needs better definition so as to make possible the construction of better scales of measurement of the constructs it contains.
Locus; attribution of causality; attitude scale