Sources of self-efficacy[edit]
Mastery experiences[edit]
According to Bandura, the most effective way to build self-efficacy is to engage in mastery experiences.[5] These mastery experiences can be defined as a personal experience of success.[13] Achieving difficult goals in the face of adversity helps build confidence and strengthen perseverance.[5]
Vicarious experiences of social models[edit]
Another source of self-efficacy is through vicarious experiences of social models. Seeing someone, who you view as similar to yourself, succeed at something difficult can motivate you to believe that you have the skills necessary to achieve a similar goal. However, the inverse of the previous statement is true as well. Seeing someone fail at a task can lead to doubt in personal skills and abilities. "The greater the assumed similarity, the more persuasive are the models' successes and failures."[5]
Belief in success[edit]
A third source of self-efficacy is found through strengthening the belief that one has the ability to succeed. Those who are positively persuaded that they have the ability to complete a given task show a greater and more sustained effort to complete a task. It also lowers the effect of self-doubt in a person. However, those who are doing the encouraging, put the person in a situation where success is more often likely to be attained. If they are put in a situation prematurely with no hope of any success, it can undermine self-efficacy.[5]
Physiological and psychological states[edit]
A person's emotional and physiological state can also influence an individual's belief about their ability to perform in a given situation.[14] When judging their own capabilities, people will often take in information from their body, how a person interprets that information impacts self-efficacy. For example, in activities that require physical strength, someone may take fatigue or pain as an indicator of inability or of effort.[15]
How it affects human function[edit]
Choices regarding behavior[edit]
People generally avoid tasks where self-efficacy is low, but undertake tasks where self-efficacy is high. When self-efficacy is significantly beyond actual ability, it leads to an overestimation of the ability to complete tasks. On the other hand, when self-efficacy is significantly lower than actual ability, it discourages growth and skill development. Research shows that the optimum level of self-efficacy is slightly above ability; in this situation, people are most encouraged to tackle challenging tasks and gain experience.[16] Self-efficacy is made of dimensions like magnitude, strength, and generality to explain how one believes they will perform on a specific task.[17]
Motivation[edit]
High self-efficacy can affect motivation in both positive and negative ways. In general, people with high self-efficacy are more likely to make efforts to complete a task, and to persist longer in those efforts, than those with low self-efficacy.[18] The stronger the self-efficacy or mastery expectations, the more active the efforts.[19]
A negative effect of low self-efficacy is that it can lead to a state of learned helplessness. Learned helplessness was studied by Martin Seligman in an experiment in which shocks were applied to animals. Through the experiment, it was discovered that the animals placed in a cage where they could escape shocks by moving to a different part of the cage did not attempt to move if they had formerly been placed in a cage in which escape from the shocks was not possible. Low self-efficacy can lead to this state in which it is believed that no amount of effort will make a difference in the success of the task at hand.[20]
Work performance[edit]
Self-efficacy theory has been embraced by management scholars and practitioners because of its applicability in the workplace. Overall, self-efficacy is positively and strongly related to work-related performance as measured by the weighted average correlation across 114 selected studies. The strength of the relationship, though, is moderated by both task complexity and environmental context. For more complex tasks, the relationships between self-efficacy and work performance is weaker than for easier work-related tasks. In actual work environments, which are characterized by performance constraints, ambiguous demands, deficient performance feedback, and other complicating factors, the relationship appears weaker than in controlled laboratory settings. The implications of this research is that managers should provide accurate descriptions of tasks and provide clear and concise instructions. Moreover, they should provide the necessary supporting elements, including training employees in developing their self-efficacy in addition to task-related skills, for employees to be successful. It has also been suggested that managers should factor in self-efficacy when trying to decide candidates for developmental or training programs. It has been found that those who are high in self-efficacy learn more which leads to higher job performance.[21]
According to one study, the study presents a new questionnaire called Work Agentic Capabilities (WAC) that measures the four agentic capabilities in the organizational context: forethought, self-regulation, self-reflection, and vicarious capability. The WAC questionnaire was validated through exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, and it was found to be positively correlated with psychological capital, positive job attitudes, proactive organizational behaviors, perceived job performance, and promotion prospects. The study concludes that the WAC questionnaire can reliably measure agentic capabilities and can be useful in understanding the sociodemographic and organizational differences in mean values of agentic capabilities.[22]
Thought patterns and responses[edit]
Self-efficacy has several effects on thought patterns and responses:
Genetic and environmental determinants[edit]
In a Norwegian twin study, the heritability of self-efficacy in adolescents was estimated at 75 percent. The remaining variance, 25 percent, was due to environmental influences not shared between family members. The shared family environment did not contribute to individual differences in self-efficacy.[28]
The twins reared-together design may overestimate the effect of genetic influences and underestimate shared environmental influences because variables measured on the family level are modeled to be equal for both twins and thus cannot be separated into genetic and environmental components. Employing an alternative design, namely that of adoptive siblings, Buchanan et al. found significant shared environmental effects.[28]
Self-efficacy was also found to be influenced by environmental factors like cultural context, home environment and educational environment. For example, parents provide their children with sets of aspirations, role models and expectations, and form beliefs about their children's abilities. Parents' beliefs are communicated to their children and affect the children's own ability beliefs.[29] The classroom environment can also influence the students' self-efficacy through the amount and type of teacher attention, social comparisons, the tasks, the grading system and more.[30] These are often influenced by school environment, including its culture and its educational philosophy. Studies showed that school environment influences the way the four sources of self-efficacy shape students' academic self-efficacy. For example, in different school systems - Democratic schools, Waldorf schools and mainstream public schools - there were differences in the way academic self-efficacy changed along grade levels, as well as variations in the roles of the various sources of self-efficacy.[31] Both parental and educational environments are embedded in wider cultural contexts which influence the way self-efficacy is formed. For example, the mathematics self-efficacy of students from collectivist cultures was found to be more influenced by vicarious experiences and social persuasions than self-efficacy of students from individualist cultures.[32]
Possible applications[edit]
Academic contexts[edit]
Parents' sense of academic efficacy for their child is linked to their children's scholastic achievement. If the parents have higher perceived academic capabilities and aspirations for their child, the child itself will share those same beliefs. This promotes academic self-efficacy for the child, and in turn, leads to scholastic achievement. It also leads to prosocial behavior, and reduces vulnerability to feelings of futility and depression.[41] There is a relationship between low self-efficacy and depression.[42]
In a study, the majority of a group of students questioned felt they had a difficulty with listening in class situations. Instructors then helped strengthen their listening skills by making them aware about how the use of different strategies could produce better outcomes. This way, their levels of self-efficacy were improved as they continued to figure out what strategies worked for them.[43]
STEM[edit]
Self-efficacy has proven especially useful for helping undergraduate students to gain insights into their career development in STEM fields.[44] Researchers have reported that mathematics self-efficacy is more predictive of mathematics interest, choice of math-related courses, and math majors than past achievements in math or outcome expectations.[44]
Self-efficacy theory has been applied to the career area to examine why women are underrepresented in male-dominated STEM fields such as mathematics, engineering, and science. It was found that gender differences in self-efficacy expectancies importantly influence the career-related behaviors and career choices of young women.[45]
Technical self-efficacy was found to be a crucial factor for teaching computer programming to school students, as students with higher levels of technological self-efficacy achieve higher learning outcomes. The effect of technical self-efficacy was found to be even stronger than the effect of gender.[46]
Writing[edit]
Writing studies research indicates a strong relationship linking perceived self-efficacy to motivation and performance outcomes. Students' academic accomplishments are inextricably connected to their self-thought of efficacy and constructed motivation within their contexts.[6] The resilient efforts that highly self-efficacious individuals exert usually enable them to face the challenge and produce high-performance achievements.[47] Besides, individuals place more value on the academic activities which they used to achieve success [48] Recent writing research accentuated this connection between writers' self-efficacy, motivation and efforts offered, and achieving success in writing. In another way, writers with a high level of confidence in their writing capabilities and processes are more willing to work persistently for satisfying and effective writing. In contrast, those who have less sense of efficacy are unable to resist any failure and tend to avoid what they believe it as a painful experience_ writing.[49] There is a causal relationship between self-efficacy beliefs that the writers hold and the accomplishments that they can achieve in their writing. Accordingly, scholars emphasized that writing self-efficacy beliefs are instrumental for making predictions of crafting outcomes.[47][50][49]
Empirically speaking, there is a study on introductory Composition courses that proved that poor writing is strongly sponsored by the writers' self-doubts of making effective writing rather than their actual writing capabilities.[51] Self-referent thought is a powerful mediator that links one's knowledge and actions.[47] Therefore, even when individuals have the required skills and knowledge, their self-referent may continue in hindering their optimal performance. A 1997 study looked at how self-efficacy could influence the writing ability of 5th graders in the United States. Researchers found that there was a direct correlation between students' self-efficacy and their own writing apprehension, essay performance, and perceived usefulness of writing. As the researchers suggest, this study is important because it showed how important it is for teachers to teach skills and also to build confidence in their students.[52] A more recent study was done that seemed to replicate the findings of the previous study quite nicely. This study found that students' beliefs about their own writing did have an impact on their self-efficacy, apprehension, and performance.[53] This is also evident in a different study on collegiate students that reported the change of knowledge seeking as an outcome of their self-efficacy promotion. Thus, students' self-efficacy is predictive of students' production of effective writing.[54] Therefore, increasing their writing positive beliefs resulted in better performance in their writing.[51] Nurturing the participants' perceived self-efficacy elevated the goals that they used to set up in the writing courses, and this, in turn, promoted their quality of writing and placed more sense of self-satisfaction.[6] Self-regulatory writing is another key determinant associated with writing efficacy and has great influence on writing development. Self-regulation encapsulates the writing dynamism of complexities, time structure, strategies, and whether deficiencies or capabilities. Through self-regulatory efficacy, writers strive toward more self-efficaciousness that effectively impacts their writing attainments[55]