Working life gives us plenty of things we cannot control. A manager changes priorities. A colleague
misses a deadline. A customer says no. A restructure changes responsibilities. The market shifts.
We may not be able to control what happens, but we often have more influence over what happens next than we first recognise.
Developing a stronger internal locus of control is about becoming better at identifying where your choices, behaviour and effort can make a difference. It does not mean believing that everything is within your control. Nor does it mean blaming yourself when things go wrong.
Instead, it means asking a more useful question:
Given what is happening, what can I do next?
What does an internal locus of control look like at work?
Locus of control describes the extent to which people believe that outcomes are influenced by their own actions, rather than primarily by external circumstances, chance or other people.
Someone with a stronger internal locus of control is more likely to look for the choices and actions available to them. Someone with a stronger external locus of control may be more likely to attribute outcomes to circumstances outside their control.
Neither perspective means that internal or external factors are always responsible. Work is more complicated than that.
The important distinction is between recognising external realities and allowing those realities to remove your sense of agency.
For example:
An internal locus of control does not require you to pretend that unfair decisions, poor systems or difficult people do not exist. It asks you to look beyond them and identify the choices that are still available.
If you would like to explore the broader psychology of locus of control and its relationship with leadership and accountability, read Locus of Control, Accountability and Leadership.
Can you develop a stronger internal locus of control?
There is good reason to believe that locus of control is not completely fixed.
Research into work locus of control suggests that our beliefs about personal influence can change over time. Importantly, those changes are not simply the result of deciding to “think more positively”. Our experiences at work matter too.
Longitudinal research by Wu, Griffin and Parker found that greater job autonomy and greater opportunities to use skills were associated with increases in internal locus of control over time.
This makes intuitive sense. When people repeatedly experience a connection between what they do and what happens, they have evidence that their actions matter.
Developing a stronger internal locus of control is therefore less about telling yourself that you are in control and more about repeatedly recognising, exercising and learning from the control and influence you genuinely have.
7 ways to develop an internal locus of control at work
1. Notice where you place responsibility
Start by listening to the explanations you give yourself when something goes wrong.
You might notice thoughts such as:
- “They will not let me.”
- “There is nothing I can do.”
- “Management always does this.”
- “Nobody listens.”
- “That is just how this organisation works.”
Sometimes these statements will contain a great deal of truth.
The problem arises when they become the end of the conversation.
Instead of immediately asking who or what caused the situation, add another question:
What part of this situation can I influence?
You may not be able to change the whole problem, but that does not necessarily mean you have no choices within it.
2. Separate what you control from what you influence
One of the biggest mistakes we can make is treating control as all or nothing.
There are usually three different categories to consider:
Control
Things that are directly yours to choose, such as your preparation, behaviour, communication, effort and response.
Influence
Things you cannot decide alone but may be able to affect through conversations, recommendations, relationships, escalation or collaboration.
Accept
Things that are genuinely outside your control or meaningful influence.
Imagine that a senior executive changes the deadline for an important project. You may not control the deadline.
You may be able to influence the scope, available resources or priorities. You can control how quickly you assess the implications, communicate the risks and decide what needs to happen next.
This distinction helps prevent two unhelpful extremes: trying to control everything, or assuming you can control nothing.
3. Replace “Who caused this?” with “What can I do next?”
Understanding the cause of a problem can be important. But identifying who caused something does not necessarily solve it.
When a situation is frustrating, try separating these two questions:
What caused this?
and
What can I do next?
The first question helps you understand the situation. The second restores agency.
For example, another team may genuinely have caused a delay. Recognising that is reasonable. But if your thinking stops there, the delay still exists.
The more useful next questions might be:
- Who needs to know?
- What can be recovered?
- What needs to change?
- What support do I need?
- What can we learn before the next project?
Taking ownership does not require taking blame. It means taking responsibility for your next available action.
4. Turn outcomes into behaviours
We often focus on outcomes that we cannot completely control.
- “I need this project to succeed.”
- “I need my team to perform.”
- “I want to get promoted.”
- “I need the customer to say yes.”
Outcomes matter, but they are rarely ours alone to decide.
Instead ask yourself:
What behaviours from me would increase
the likelihood of the outcome I want?
For a project, that might mean better planning, earlier communication, clearer responsibilities or faster escalation.
For a promotion, it might mean building capability, seeking feedback, taking on broader responsibility or making your contribution more visible.
For a team leader, it might mean setting clearer expectations, giving better feedback or addressing performance issues earlier.
When we translate desired outcomes into behaviours, we move our attention towards actions we can actually choose.
5. Use feedback as information
Feedback can feel personal, particularly when we disagree with it.
An external response may focus primarily on the person giving the feedback:
- “They are wrong.”
- “They have never liked me.”
- “They do not understand what I am dealing with.”
Again, any of those things could be true. An internal locus of control asks something additional:
Is there anything in this feedback that I can use?
You do not have to agree with every observation to learn from it. Feedback becomes more useful when we treat it as information that can inform a choice rather than as a final judgement about who we are.
6. Build evidence that your actions matter
One way to strengthen a sense of agency is to build evidence for it.
Start small.
Make the phone call you have been avoiding.
Clarify the responsibility that has been confusing your team.
Raise the issue that keeps creating delays.
Ask for the feedback you need.
Change one behaviour during the next difficult conversation.
Complete one commitment that you have been postponing.
Then notice what happens.
The outcome may not always be exactly what you wanted, but you begin to see the relationship between:
choice → behaviour → consequence
Over time, these experiences provide practical evidence that your behaviour can influence outcomes.
7. Review setbacks without blame or avoidance
Setbacks provide one of the best opportunities to practise an internal locus of control.
After something goes wrong, ask three questions:
- What was outside my control?
- What was within my control or influence?
- What will I do differently next time?
The first question protects against inappropriate self blame.
The second protects against helplessness.
The third turns reflection into learning.
This approach is particularly valuable when emotions are running high. It allows you to acknowledge reality without surrendering your ability to respond to it.
Internal locus of control does not mean taking responsibility for everything
This distinction matters.
There are many things at work that individuals cannot reasonably control.
Organisations restructure. Jobs disappear. Markets change. Managers make poor decisions. Customers change their minds. People sometimes behave unfairly. Employees can be given responsibilities without the authority or resources required to fulfil them.
A healthy internal locus of control does not require you to accept personal responsibility for all of those things.
Nor should it be used by organisations as a way of shifting responsibility for poor systems or working conditions onto individuals.
Instead, the question becomes:
Given what is true, where do I still have agency?
Sometimes the answer will be substantial.
Sometimes your influence will be limited.
Sometimes the most appropriate action will be to raise an issue, seek support, establish a boundary, challenge a decision or decide that the situation needs to change.
Recognising the limits of your control is just as important as recognising the opportunities to exercise it.
What organisations can do to strengthen agency at work
Internal locus of control is often discussed as an individual characteristic, but the environment in which people work also matters.
If employees are repeatedly told to take ownership but are given no authority to make decisions, no resources to solve problems and little opportunity to influence how work is done, the message quickly becomes contradictory.
Research suggests that job autonomy and opportunities to use skills can contribute to stronger internal control beliefs over time.
Organisations can support agency by giving people:
- clear rules and expectations
- well defined roles
- appropriate responsibilities
- the authority needed to fulfil those responsibilities
- access to suitable resources
- meaningful opportunities to make decisions
- useful feedback
- opportunities to build and apply capability
Leaders therefore have an important role.
Encouraging ownership while unnecessarily controlling every decision can create dependence rather than agency.
The goal is not to remove structure. It is to create enough clarity, capability and appropriate autonomy for people to act effectively within it.
From locus of control to behaviour
Understanding locus of control can provide useful insight, but insight alone does not change what happens at work.
Behaviour does.
One way to think about this is through three lenses:
Attitude
How am I interpreting what is happening?
Aptitude
Do I have the capability required to respond effectively?
Approach
What behaviour will I choose next?
A person may recognise that they have influence over a situation but still need the confidence, emotional regulation, resilience, communication skills or assertiveness to act on it.
This is why developing agency at work is not simply a matter of changing your thinking.
Our attitudes affect the choices we see. Our capability affects the choices available to us. Our behaviour determines what we actually do.
At flowprofiler®, we describe this broader understanding of workplace behaviour as behavioural intelligence: recognising how we behave, understanding the effect of those behaviours, and making more deliberate choices about what we do next.
A simple locus of control check
The next time you find yourself frustrated by something at work, try asking:
- What is actually happening?
- What is outside my control?
- What can I influence?
- What can I control directly?
- What behaviour from me would help now?
- What will I do next?
You do not need to pretend the problem is smaller than it is. You simply need to identify the part that is yours to act upon.
Remember
You cannot control every outcome at work. You can, however, become much more deliberate about what you do with the control and influence you have.
Developing a stronger internal locus of control is not about believing that everything depends on you. It is about resisting the assumption that nothing does.
When something changes, goes wrong or gets in the way, the most useful question is often also the simplest: What can I do next?
References
Ng, T. W. H., Sorensen, K. L., & Eby, L. T. (2006). Locus of control at work: A meta-analysis. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 27(8), 1057–1087. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.416
Rotter, J. B. (1966). Generalized expectancies for internal versus external control of reinforcement. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, 80(1), 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0092976
Spector, P. E. (1982). Behavior in organizations as a function of employee’s locus of control. Psychological Bulletin, 91(3), 482–497. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.91.3.482
Spector, P. E. (1988). Development of the Work Locus of Control Scale. Journal of Occupational Psychology, 61(4), 335–340. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8325.1988.tb00470.x
Wang, Q., Bowling, N. A., & Eschleman, K. J. (2010). A meta-analytic examination of work and general locus of control. Journal of Applied Psychology, 95(4), 761–768. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0017707
Wu, C. H., Griffin, M. A., & Parker, S. K. (2015). Developing agency through good work: Longitudinal effects of job autonomy and skill utilization on locus of control. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 89, 102–108. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2015.05.004
