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Thursday, May 10, 2012

Harnessing Self-esteem towards more effective work

In the last blog we learnt about self-efficacy and its implications for a manager. In today's blog we will look at the concept of self-esteem and its implication for a manager.

Self-esteem is a pretty common term that we use in our daily lives! In management, it refers to the individual's general feeling of self worth. It is normal for every person to have strengths as well as weakness - when ones belief that their strengths are more important than their weakness, we say the individual has a high self-esteem. On the contrary, a person with a low self-confidence views themselves negatively. People with low self esteem are seen to be strongly affected by what other people think about them - they complement people who give a favorable feedback while cut down people giving unfavorable feedback.

It is not to say that evaluation of other people doesn’t have an effect at all - If the evaluation is to say the individual is liked for what one is - it is seem to have a more stable effect on individual's self-esteem; while being liked for ones achievement has a temporary effect on one's self-esteem.

Self-esteem also has an effect on a host of other aspects including the attitude one has towards things. It has been seen that people with high self-esteem perform better and are more satisfied with their jobs. A team with high self-esteem people is more likely to be successful.

Extremely high self-esteem is not a good thing - it could lead to overconfidence and relation conflicts. Such individuals would also shift their social identities to protect themselves when they do not live up to the standard.

Success tends to raise self-esteem while failure tends to lower it. Given that this is generally a positive characteristics, managers should encourage employees to raise their self-esteem by giving them appropriate challenge and opportunities for success.

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