In this post, we explain what self-efficacy is and why it’s so important at work. We also share five actionable strategies to boost your employees’ self-efficacy.
Self-efficacy relates to how capable we believe ourselves to be.
People with high self-efficacy are confident in their ability to achieve certain outcomes. This belief influences how they approach different tasks and how they behave when faced with challenges.
Self-efficacy applies to all areas of life—including the workplace. In this post, we’ll focus on self-efficacy at work, exploring why it matters and outlining concrete steps you can take to boost your employees’ self-efficacy.
Table of Contents
- What Is Self-Efficacy?
- Self-Efficacy vs. Self-Esteem
- Examples of Self-Efficacy
- The Importance and Value of Self-Efficacy in the Workplace
- 5 Strategies to Boost Your Employees’ Self-Efficacy
- The Takeaway
What Is Self-Efficacy?
People with high degrees of self-efficacy are confident that they can manage and control their behavior to reach certain outcomes. In other words, they have a strong belief that they can accomplish things and succeed in a given situation.
The term “self-efficacy” was coined by psychologist Albert Bandura in 1977. According to Bandura, there are four main influences that shape a person’s self-efficacy beliefs:
- Mastery experiences (or performance outcomes): If you have previously been successful at learning a new skill or overcoming a challenge, this strengthens your belief in your ability to succeed in the future.
- Vicarious experiences (social role models): If you observe other people who are similar to you (or people you can relate to) successfully completing certain tasks, you’ll develop a greater belief that you too can succeed.
- Social persuasion: Receiving verbal encouragement and positive feedback from others while you undertake a certain task helps to convince you that you’re capable of completing it successfully.
- Emotional and physiological states: Your emotional, physical, and psychological well-being may impact your self-efficacy beliefs. For example, some studies suggest a correlation between low self-efficacy and high levels of depression and anxiety.
Self-Efficacy vs. Self-Esteem
It’s important to note that, while self-efficacy and self-esteem may go hand-in-hand, they are not the same thing.
Self-esteem relates to how we feel about ourselves in general—our sense of value and worth. Self-efficacy, on the other hand, relates specifically to how strongly we believe in our ability to successfully complete certain tasks or navigate certain situations.
Examples of Self-Efficacy
People with high self-efficacy are able to set goals and, most importantly, take action to accomplish them. And, because they have a strong sense of belief in their ability to achieve their goals, they are better able to commit, persevere, and recover from setbacks.
So what does self-efficacy look like in action? Let’s consider some examples.
- A person setting out to learn a new language feels confident that if they attend all their classes, do their homework, watch movies, and listen to podcasts, they’ll be able to reach their desired level of proficiency.
- A person gets promoted at work to the position of team lead. Although they have never managed a team before, they feel confident in their ability to learn and do the job successfully.
- A person has an accident and injures their foot. They feel confident that, if they see a physiotherapist and follow their doctor’s advice, they can improve their condition.
Self-efficacy shows up in all areas of life, and people can possess high degrees of self-efficacy in some areas and low self-efficacy in others. For example, you may have a high degree of self-efficacy at work or in academia but a low degree of self-efficacy when it comes to health and fitness.
The Importance and Value of Self-Efficacy in the Workplace
Self-efficacy has an important role to play in the workplace. It impacts job performance, job satisfaction, and employee well-being — all crucial pillars of business success.
Employees with a high degree of self-efficacy:
- Are confident in their ability to take on new challenges and try new things. This often translates into more creativity and innovation.
- Believe that they can acquire new skills through learning and practice. This fosters career progression, job mobility, and a general culture of lifelong learning.
- Demonstrate persistence and perseverance. They see difficult tasks as challenges to overcome rather than threats to be avoided, and they are determined and steadfast in their approach.
- Are resilient when faced with setbacks. They tend to recover quickly and focus on course-correcting rather than giving up or dwelling on failure.
- Are highly adaptable. Because they’re confident in their ability to learn new things and take on new challenges, self-efficacious employees can adapt quickly to movement and change.
- Tend to be more motivated. High levels of self-efficacy often go hand-in-hand with motivation. When employees believe they can achieve something, they’ll likely be more motivated to go ahead and do it.
Employees with strong self-efficacy are essential for building high-performing teams and achieving your business goals.
So how can you nurture and boost self-efficacy at work?
5 Strategies to Boost Your Employees’ Self-Efficacy
1. Provide positive feedback and recognition
This speaks to the social persuasion factor—the idea that receiving verbal encouragement and feedback can bolster a person’s belief in their own ability to succeed.
Feedback and recognition can take many different forms, be it a direct message to the employee, acknowledging someone’s success in front of the whole team, or establishing a peer-to-peer recognition program.
You can also boost employees’ self-efficacy by expressing your own belief in their ability to succeed ahead of a new task. For example: “You’re a talented presenter so I know you’ll ace that new client proposal!” or “I really believe you’ll be a great leader for this project.”
The more you believe in your employees—and tell them so—the more they’ll believe in themselves.
2. Offer mentorship and role-modeling
This strategy taps into the vicarious experiences factor—seeing other people succeed and therefore believing that you can, too.
Mentorship and role-modeling should naturally come from leaders and managers, but that’s not the only source. Consider setting up a peer mentorship program that pairs employees with role models they can relate to.
For example, if you’ve got a junior social media manager on the team, the head of social media would be a great role model; someone they can look at and think “They started out as a junior social media manager, too. If I follow in their footsteps, I can become a head of social media one day!”
3. Promote psychological safety and goal-setting
The most influential factor in shaping a person’s self-efficacy is mastery experiences. Ultimately, when we have first-hand experience of being successful at a given task, we view this as evidence that we can succeed again in the future.
This requires psychological safety: an environment that feels safe for risk-taking and making mistakes without fear of punishment. Without psychological safety, employees won’t want to try new things—and will therefore struggle to get those confidence-building mastery experiences. You can learn how to create psychological safety at work here.
It also requires setting achievable goals. If you set unattainable goals, you’re setting your employees up for failure. Set realistic goals and you’re priming your employees for success.
Small wins can help to build confidence and self-efficacy, paving the way for more complex goals and challenges in the future.
4. Nurture employee well-being
The fourth factor identified by Bandura as impacting a person’s self-efficacy is their emotional and physiological states—in other words, a person’s emotional, physical, and psychological well-being.
There are many steps you can take to nurture your employees’ well-being and subsequently promote self-efficacy. Support mental health in the workplace by encouraging a healthy work-life balance, providing access to mental health resources, and learning how to spot and address the symptoms of burnout.
Build an inclusive workplace where everybody feels safe, welcome, and respected—starting with inclusive language—and learn how to recognize imposter syndrome and help your employees overcome it.
All of these measures are crucial for preventing and reducing employee stress, improving general happiness and well-being, and setting the stage for greater self-efficacy.
5. Prioritize training, learning, and development
People with a high degree of self-efficacy believe in their ability to learn new skills and close their own skills gaps. As an employer, you can (and should!) reinforce this belief through training and development.
Encourage both formal, professional learning and personal development—anything that provides the opportunity to learn new skills and build self-efficacy. Leverage top learning and development trends such as microlearning, gamification, and social learning to deliver training that’s both effective and engaging, and empower your employees to determine their own learning pathways.
When you prioritize learning and development, you give your employees agency over their own growth and performance outcomes. That’s what self-efficacy is all about!
The Takeaway
When we believe in our ability to learn new things, tackle complex challenges, and accomplish our goals, there’s really no limit to what we can achieve. If you want to empower your employees to succeed, focus on self-efficacy— using our five actionable strategies as your starting point. For more tips or to learn more ways to add learning and development into your employees’ professional development, visit our website.
