How does the psychological capital affect your performance and wellbeing?
In our blog post: Psychological capital makes your team feel and perform better, we defined the concept psychological capital and its components:
- Hope
- Efficacy
- Resilience
- Optimism
Also in the blog post: How to increase the psychological capital in your team by working with hope, we described how a lot of research has shown the connection between the psychological capital and how well you perform, both as an individual and as a team. We also described how you as a leader can develop your team’s psychological capital with focus on the first dimension: hope.
In this blog post we continue with the second dimension: efficacy.
How you as a leader develop the psychological capital in your team with focus on efficacy
Efficacy is the second dimension in the psychological capital, and probably the one with the clearest connection to individual as well as the team’s performance. Efficacy means that you have a conviction about your own ability to e.g. perform certain tasks and manage different problems and challenges.
Bandura (1997) defined efficacy as “people’s beliefs about their capabilities to produce effects“. Below is a movie that explains Banduras model of efficacy.
One of the most efficient ways to develop efficacy (both within yourself and your team), is to expose the team to things you wish to have more confidence in, and to practice on them.
When you feel that you reach a level, you raise the expectations and challenge the team with the next level. This feeling of development, being challenged, and managing tougher and tougher challenges, makes the confidence grow. When confidence grows, motivation to challenge yourself with the next level is also increased. It becomes a positive spiral.
There are also other ways to work with efficacy, e.g. to work with constructive feedback, share experiences, observing people who can do the things you wish to be able to, and to visualize how to conduct things that you want to feel more confident in. These methods can also work, but the best one is clearly the method described above.
