Mobile Edition
Print
Get the Mag
Weekly UpdatesProposition 3a: High leadership self-efficacy is positively related to high leader performance.
Proposition 3b: Causal reasoning processes influence leadership self-efficacy which influences leader goals, leader task strategies, and a leader's utilization of his or her task schema.
Leader Goals
Goals guide behavior. And specific, challenging (or highly valued) goals motivate and sustain effort over time (Lock & Latham, 1990). They also influence an individual's thought and action by affecting what the person attends to in the environment (the causal reasoning process) and by prompting and supporting development of effective task strategies. In addition, goals partially mediate the effects of self-efficacy on task performance. Empirical studies based on goal theory have determined that commitment to a personal goal leads individuals to persist in the face of obstacles, work harder on tasks, direct cognitive and behavioral resources toward goal relevant actions, and formulate effective task strategies (Locke & Latham, 1990). Once a goal is achieved, it loses its motivational effect.
Personal goals identify what a leader wants to accomplish. As Kane et al. (2002) point out, leaders probably have a complex system of goals ranging from results associated with an abstract personal vision to results related to concrete, bottom-line group performance. But we presently know nothing about the content of leaders' goal sets, nor how leaders' goals are organized in memory.
From the perspective of CR theory, we view leader's goals as a function of their assessments of the causal dimensions in their environment (i.e., task schemata) and their self-efficacy beliefs. More specifically, if a leader sees a particular task environment as resource rich (task schemata) and believe he has the ability to achieve high levels of success in the environment (i.e., high self-efficacy), he will have an optimistic causal structure and set high goals. On the other hand, if the environment is perceived as resource poor and the leader perceives that either her ability or effort will be stressed (i.e., low self-efficacy), she will not set high goals. Thus:
Proposition 4a: High goals are the result of perceptions of resource rich task schemata and high-self-efficacy beliefs.
Proposition 4b: Low goals are the result of resource poor task schemata and low self-efficacy estimates.
Leadership Strategies
As suggested by the discussion above, the social cognitive model of group leadership shown in Figure 1 depicts LSE, leader goals, and leader task schema as influencing leadership strategies, which are the action plans developed by a group leader. These strategies are the source of a leader's behavior, which is defined as a leader's observable actions. Findings from research involving complex tasks has revealed that challenging performance goals and high self-efficacy beliefs lead individuals to persist in the face of obstacles, work harder on tasks, and apply cognitive effort to identifying effective task strategies (Wood & Bandura, 1989). In the only leadership study of its kind, Kane et al. (2002) found that leader strategies predicted leader behaviors, and that leader strategies mediated the effects of LSE and leader goals on group outcomes.
However, while high self-efficacy and high goals enhance physical and cognitive efforts along with directing and focusing one's strategic thoughts, these factors are not sufficient to ensure that appropriate task strategies are developed and smoothly enacted. Even efficacious leaders with challenging goals may approach a group leadership setting with faulty knowledge about the causal factors involved in group effectiveness or with inadequate skills and abilities. This leads to active yet ineffective leadership. Thus, a leader's task schemata are vital to both the leadership strategy development and implementation processes. From the previous discussion, the next propositions are offered.
Proposition 5a: LSE, leader goals, and leader task schema influence leadership strategy development and implementation.
Proposition 5b: Leadership strategies influence leader behaviors, which in turn influence group performance conditions.
Implications for Research and Practice
One of the most widely held principles of organizational behavior is that leadership matters; that is, group and organizational effectiveness depend upon effective leadership (Pfeffer, 1977). That belief has been the primary reason for one hundred years of research, thousands of published studies, hundreds of books, countless training seminars, and millions of dollars of corporate and government expenditures. Bandura's (1997) SCT and the CR perspective (Martinko, 2002) would argue that the field of leadership research has overlooked an essential set of factors: leader social cognitions, particularly with respect to the causal factors relating to success and failure. The purpose of this paper was to elucidate key leader social cognitions and their relations (see Figure 1). The proposed model has implications for research and practice.
First, the model brings together two highly developed research streams, SCT and CR, and extends them to the leadership studies domain. What results is a nomonological network of five leader social cognitions: (1) leader causal reasoning process, (2) leader self-efficacy, (3) leader goals, (4) leader task schema, and (5) leader strategies. Each is grounded in either the SCT or CR literature, described and defined conceptually, and linked together based on both theory and empirical findings. Testable hypotheses are offered to guide future research.
Second, integrating the CR perspective with SCT addresses a shortcoming in Bandura's (1997) theory, how people evaluate and integrate performance information from their environment to arrive at their self-efficacy estimates. As Martinko (2002) and the model we have developed explain, people have attribution styles (consistent patterns of thinking about success and failure) and within the context of CR theory, self-efficacy is the result of causal attributions relating to the likelihood of success at a task, such as group leadership. Thus, over time, all other factors being equal, a leader with a generally optimistic CR style will report higher leader self-efficacy than a leader with a pessimistic attribution style. This implies that for selection purposes a management candidate with an optimistic attribution style would in the long run be more likely to succeed, since high leader self-efficacy appears necessary for effective leadership. Assessment tools for identifying the two attribution styles are available (see Martinko, 2002). On the other hand, a candidate with unrealistically low leader self-efficacy due to a pessimistic attribution style could benefit from re-attribution training like the intervention developed by Seligman (1991) on learned optimism. This situation may be particularly relevant for preparing women and minorities for business leadership roles because prior research has revealed that these two groups report lower self-confidence than their white male counterparts (McCormick, Tanguma, & Sohn, 2003).
Third, proposing that high LSE contributes to leader effectiveness has implications for leadership development and training. It suggests that enhancing LSE should be a key objective for training designers, as well as a criterion for evaluating any development interventions. Fortunately, Bandura (1997) and his associates have already identified what is involved in improving self-efficacy, so leadership training designers can use his work to guide the design of development activities more likely to improve trainees' LSE. A quick search of the training evaluation literature indicated that the LSE construct has not yet caught the attention of training specialists. A possible explanation for this is the lack of a validated measure of LSE.
Fourth, according to Wofford, et al. (1998), task schema that guide behavior and expectations are relatively robust to change. Hackman and Walton (1986) also believe that an accurate and comprehensive cognitive model of small group leadership can be trained. What is needed is a measurement protocol that will make explicit the schema that individuals hold about what is involved in effective leadership. Next, the schema for successful leadership must be identified by evaluating the leadership schema of effective leaders. Finally, training designs that will successfully modify trainees' mental models to conform with those of successful group leaders are needed. Another line of study would involve exploring leader goals, especially the hierarchical structure of leader goal sets and how they are organized in the leader's casual structures.
In conclusion, this paper is primarily a thought piece suggesting how the dynamics of the causal reasoning process articulated in attribution theory can provide the infrastructure for the self- and member-regulatory processes that come to mind when we think of applying Bandura's SCT to leadership. Cleary much more work needs to be done to test the propositions suggested and to more fully articulate how the specific dimensions, explanations, and knowledge of the biases described in attribution theory can contribute to our knowledge of the intrapersonal and interpersonal regulatory processes that characterize a SCT approach to leadership.
References
Abramson, L. Y., Seligman, M.E.P. & Teasdale, J.D. (1978). Learned helplessness in humans: Critique and reformulation. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 87, 49-74.
Ashkanasy, N. (1989). Causal attributions and supervisors' response to subordinate performance: The Green and Mitchell model revisited. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 19, 309-330.
Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84, 191-215.
FEED