Friday, February 7, 2014

What is self-efficacy? How does self-efficacy impact motivation and behavior? Please provide examples

          The concern of self-efficacy theory is with how individual’s beliefs concerning his or her own capabilities can affect his or her behavior (Spector, 2014). Therefore, an individual's motivation and performance in relation to attempting and completing a task is dependent on how effective one believes he or she can be. An individual with high self-efficacy holds the belief that he or she has the capability to accomplish tasks and posses the motivation of putting forth such an effort. However, an individual with low self-efficacy does not hold the belief that he or she has the capability to accomplish tasks and does not possess the motivation of putting forth such an effort. Spector (2012) "in a way, this is like a self-fulfilling prophecy in which a person behaves in a manner that fulfills his or her initial belief" (p. 202). For example, if an employee has high self-efficacy he or she will be motivated to put forth an effort to accomplish being promoted to a higher job role within an organization. However, if an employee has low-efficacy he or she will not be motivated to accomplish being promoted to a higher job role.
         An individual’s previous experiences of performance are a source of attributions that can affect an individual's self-efficacy. For example, if an employee scores high on his or her last three performance reviews, his or her belief that he or she will score high on the next performance review is high; therefore, he or she is motivated to put forth the effort to make another high score on the next performance review. However, if he or she did not score high on the last three performance reviews, then his or her belief in his or her ability to score high on the next performance review is low; therefore, he or she is not motivated to put forth the effort to score high on the next performance review.
Reference
Spector, P. E. (2012). Industrial and organizational psychology (6th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

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