Efficacy

Efficacy is the power people have to produce an effect. People hold beliefs about their own efficacy and about the efficacy of people with whom they work. Such beliefs define a crucial basis for several aspects of leadership, including how much effort a leader devotes to social influence and how effectively a group responds to leadership influence. This psychological quality indicates a person's conviction (or lack thereof) that he or she can enact behaviors leading to desired outcomes. Motivated behavior is purposive, based on personal reflection, foresight, and planning. Based on this reflection, people choose goals to attain. Their choices depend in large part on their confidence that they can do what they need to do to meet their goals. Although people often choose to accomplish tasks for which they believe they have limited competence, such choices are often driven by external constraints and contingencies. On the whole, when having complete freedom of choice, people choose behaviors and tasks that they are at least somewhat confident they can accomplish. Efficacy, therefore, reflects psychological processes related to a person's choice of particular goal paths, the amount of effort devoted to attainment of chosen goals, and the persistence of effort when progress toward goal attainment is thwarted.

People's beliefs about their own efficacy—selfefficacy—pertain to specific tasks and circumstances. Self-efficacy reflects competency beliefs about one's ability to accomplish a particular set of tasks in a defined situation. Thus, people have beliefs in their ability to drive a car, lose weight, quit smoking, handle a sailboat, play an instrument, and so on. Some efficacy beliefs may reflect a broader class of activities, such as believed competency in raising children, accomplishing one's job, or playing a sport. These activities typically reflect a large number of distinct behaviors, all bearing on more [Page 411]abstract goals (e.g., raising well-behaved, responsible children; achieving high job performance, winning a tournament). This distinction is particularly relevant to leadership because leadership reflects a generalized class of behaviors pertaining to individual and group accomplishment of a range of tasks. So one's efficacy beliefs regarding leadership competence are likely to reflect believed competency at a variety of subtasks.

Some researchers have described generalized notions of efficacy as reflecting beliefs extending across many kinds of tasks. As such beliefs become broader and more diffuse, they tend to lose their ability to predict effectiveness and behavior in specific situations. However, leadership efficacy has been shown to predict a variety of tasks to denote the broad category of leadership performance, suggesting that it reflects a more general sense of efficacy.