Wednesday, May 9, 2012

What drives your work's effectiveness?

In the last blog, we looked at the implication of Locus of Control, in today's blog we look at Self Efficacy and look at how a manager could make use of this understanding.

Self-efficacy could be seen to be of two types based on the scope of activities - General and Task. General Self-Efficacy refers to the general belief of an individual about one's ability to meet the job demands in a wide variety of situations. An Employee with a high general self-efficacy would be more confident in their job-related ability and would show a larger positive energy, influence others etc - this in turn affects them perform better at their activity. Individuals with low self-efficacy feel ineffective at their work place and express doubts about their ability to perform a new task well.

An adage that "success attracts success" is in some ways associated with these characteristics of a team to certain extent. When one succeeds in a task, the self-belief increases and this is transferred to the next task they do and so on - there by making it a chain. It is also interesting to note that people with high self-efficacy would like to provide their opinions in the task they do at work. The opportunity to participate is extremely important for the people with high self-efficacy.

A Manager would need to carefully observe the behavior of the employees working with him and create opportunities for people to increase their self-efficacy.

Task specific Self-Efficacy is a similar belief but limits itself to a specific task.

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