Identifying leader social cognitions: integrating the causal reasoning perspective into social cognitive theory.

Proposition 1a: All other factors being equal, a leader with an optimistic attributional style will report higher leadership self-efficacy, set more challenging goals, and possess more complete leader task schema than a leader with a pessimistic attribution style.

In addition to the above proposition, the notion of attributional biases also deserves comment. In the attributional literature as well as in the leadership literature, the importance and impact of self-serving and actor-observer biases is well documented (Dobbins & Russell, 1986; Martinko & Gardner, 1987). One of the contributions of Martinko's (2002) recent book is the notion that effective leaders are able to overcome attributional biases enabling them to make accurate and unbiased assessments of causation in their environments. Thus, as suggested by Heider's early work, Martinko views the ability of leaders to accurately and objectively evaluate themselves and diagnose leadership situations as one of the primary factors enabling leaders to effectively engage in regulating themselves as well as others. Thus, we would expect that, in long-term relationships:

Proposition 1b: Leaders who are unbiased in their causal reasoning (e.g., do not display accentuated self-serving or actor-observer biases) generate more efficacious behavior than leaders who are less objective in their causal analyses of their environments.

In addition to the focus on attribution styles, CR theory also focuses on how the leader's causal analysis of the specific situations is likely to influence all of the others processes depicted in Figure 1. More specifically, we view the leaders' assessment of the causal factors for both current and past success and failure as the starting point for leaders views regarding their goals, task schemata, self-efficacy estimates, strategy, and behavior. Thus, for example, if a leader views past successes as a result of his or her internal and stable attributes and views the current situation as similar, the leaders will be likely to have a positive leader schemata, set aggressive goals, have high self efficacy, and both develop and display strategies and behaviors that are designed to exploit the leader's abilities. On the other hand, when leaders make external and unstable attributions (e.g., luck) for past successes and the likelihood of success in current situations, leaders are unlikely to express high self-efficacy, will set inadequate goals, will have an unstable task schemata, and will demonstrate both strategies and behaviors that are inappropriate to achieving aggressive goals, because they believe that they have little control over the outcomes. Thus, we believe that we can map leaders schemata's, goals, self-efficacy estimates, strategies and behaviors as a function of their attributions for both prior and current successes.

Proposition 1c: Leaders' attributions for prior and current successes are predictive of their task schemata, goals, self-efficacy estimates, strategies, and behaviors.

Leader Task Schema

The premise of this section is that for anyone to be successful in a leadership role, they must first know something about being a good leader, and also have the skills to carry out the role. With the exception of cognitive resource theory (Fiedler & Garcia, 1987), none of the contemporary leadership models incorporate leader schema, scripts and knowledge structures as an explanatory variable. However, a line of research undertaken by Lord and his associates (Lord & Maher, 1993) has extensively explored the cognitive schema involved in followers' perceptions of leaders. What they found was that people hold particular leader prototypes, or implicit theories, about the attributes and behaviors associated with "good" leadership, and that these cognitive models are developed mainly through life experiences. When a person in a leadership role appears to have a sufficient number of these attributes, observers (or followers) conclude that the individual has leadership capacity. Although no research was found that discusses the leader's own leadership prototype of how good leaders appear and behave, Lord's work does imply that whether an individual is in a leadership position or not, each person has an implicit model or schema that guides their behavior and influences how the leadership context is perceived, that is, his or her causal reasoning. This contention is further supported by the work of Hackman and Walton (1986) on the leadership of task performing groups in organizations.

From an extensive review of the literature or groups, Hackman and Walton (1986) concluded that individuals in group leadership roles behave in accord with a cognitive model (i.e., a CR model) of leadership that specifies what kinds of actions are likely to produce what kinds of results and what factors in the leadership situation should be attended to. In addition, they concluded that these personal models often are implicit, they often are wrong, and they typically focus selectively on only a limited set of variables. From a causal reasoning perspective, these results and conclusions suggest that these inadequate schemas are the result of inaccurate and frequently biased cognitive processes (i.e., over simplistic optimism or pessimism). Thus, from our perspective, CR processes set the stage for the development of leaders' task schemata. This suggests that successful leaders are guided by leadership schemas (and CR) that are more accurate and comprehensive than their less effective counterparts. Thus, the following propositions are presented.

Proposition 2a: Other factors being equal, the task schema leaders use to guide their behavior differ substantially for effective as compared to ineffective leaders.

Proposition 2b: The leader's CR processes, which reflect their beliefs about causation in their environments, influence the leader's task schema.

Leadership Self-Efficacy

Self-efficacy refers to the extent to which a person believes that he or she can perform well in a specific task domain (i.e., hitting a baseball, teaching a class, making a sale). It is a social cognition, a self-evaluative judgment regarding one's capabilities to meet the cognitive and behavioral requirements of a particular task situation. In short, it is task-specific self-confidence. However, unlike self-confidence, which is regarded as a stable, trait characteristic, self-efficacy is malleable, capable of being changed given the right conditions. In addition, self-efficacy is conceptually different from other more familiar psychological constructs such as self-esteem, locus of control, and outcome expectancies (see Gist, 1987 for discussion of differences). Also, its impact on job performance is well documented. A meta-analysis by Stajkovic and Luthans (1998) revealed that enhanced self-efficacy accounted for a 28 percent gain in job performance.

Efficacious beliefs have been shown to influence bow much effort people will devote to a task, and how long they will persist in the face of challenging circumstances (Bandura, 1997). Further, efficacy beliefs also affect the cognitive mechanisms that drive behavior. Self-efficacy impacts performance through its influence on the goals people set for themselves, on their use of task-relevant knowledge, skills, and abilities, on the development of effective task strategies, and on their causal reasoning process. Individuals with high self-efficacy set higher performance goals, develop and more skillfully enact effective task strategies than those low in self-efficacy perceptions (Wood & Bandura, 1989; Kane, Zaccaro, Tremble and Masuda, 2002). Also, for those with low self-efficacy, failure is seen as discouraging, but for those high in self-efficacy, failure actually is motivating (Bandura & Cervone, 1983), a finding which illustrates how self-efficacy beliefs influence the causal reasoning factor. Furthermore, under stressful circumstances, people with high self-efficacy are able to remain task-focused, while those with low self-efficacy are beset with debilitating thoughts that interfere with their problem-solving efforts. In sum, high self-efficacy contributes to effective performance. Adapting the self-efficacy construct to the leadership process is discussed next. The perspective taken here in developing the leadership self-efficacy construct is that leadership is about "building and maintaining effective teams" (Hogan & Warrenfeltz, 2003, p.79). Thus, from our perspective:

Leadership self-efficacy (LSE) is one's self-perceived capability to perform the cognitive and behavioral functions necessary to optimize group performance conditions. More generally, it is a person's confidence in his or her ability to monitor and influence the factors that contribute to effective group performance.

As indicated above, we view leadership as a complex and demanding intrapersonal as well as interpersonal task that occurs in an ever-changing social environment. Its purpose is to help a group successfully accomplish its work by using social influence processes to organize, direct, coordinate, and motivate group members. Put another way, someone in the group (typically the formal leader) takes action with the intended purpose of influencing one or more of the factors that contribute to a group's overall performance. Research on small groups has identified six factors that affect group performance (Hackman &Walton, 1986; Kogler-Hill, 2001). These group performance conditions are a clear group purpose, motivated group members, skilled group members, appropriate individual and group task strategies, effective group process characteristics, and adequate support from the group's organizational environment. This includes things like reward structures, adequate technology, training and development resources, process coaching, organizational culture, etc. The leader's task is to continually monitor these conditions, diagnose any deficiencies in these conditions, determine the changes needed, and take appropriate actions to remedy any problems. Thus, from the perspective of CR theory, self-efficacy beliefs arise from leaders' experiences and abilities to cognitively process the causes of success and failure in their environments. More specifically, if a leader believes that a major cause of success at a particular task is her accumulated knowledge and skill as well as that of the work group, it is likely that she will be optimistic in her causal reasoning and have high self-efficacy with respect to that particular task. On the other hands, if a leader believes that the environment is extremely difficult, she is likely to experience pessimistic attributions regarding potential success, and have low self-efficacy with regard to the ability to perform that particular task. Similarly, particularly resilient leaders may assess the reasons for failure in a task environment and conclude that they can be successful in a particular task environment by changing their task strategy and maintaining consistent effort, resulting in high self-efficacy for that particular task. Thus, we contend that causal reasoning, which includes beliefs about both prior and anticipated success and failures, is a major antecedent to efficacy beliefs.

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