Relating Occupational Self Efficacy to Team Effectiveness

Abstract

Organisations have embraced teams and teamwork as an effective way of doing business. The last 20 years has seen the replacement of 'supervisors' by 'team leaders'. Employee motivation and morale improves dramatically when people feel valued and when their contributions make a difference. What works in an organization in reaching its goals is not an individual, but properly integrated teamwork. A strong sense of efficacy enhances human accomplishment and personal well-being in many ways. People with high assurance in their capabilities approach difficult tasks as challenges to be mastered rather than as threats to be avoided. Such an efficacious outlook fosters intrinsic interest and deep engrossment in activities. They set themselves challenging goals and maintain strong commitment to them. They heighten and sustain their efforts in the face of failure. They quickly recover their sense of efficacy after failures or setbacks. They attribute failure to insufficient effort or deficient knowledge and skills which are acquirable. They approach threatening situations with assurance that they can exercise control over them. Such an efficacious outlook produces personal accomplishments, reduces stress and lowers vulnerability to depression. Efficacy has long been considered to be an influential mechanism through which differences in experience influence performance (Bandura, 1982, 1997) and positive relationships have been shown between efficacy and performance at both the individual and team levels. Bandura (1986), Wood and Bandura (1989), and Stajkovic and Luthans (1998) all argue that individual efficacy affects performance, which in turn affects the individual‘s future perception of efficacy; additionally, Bandura (2000) later commented that people‘s increasing interdependency makes the need to understand collective efficacy increasingly important. It was found out that there is a significant statistical difference in team effectiveness of the employees with respect to gender (F = 8.276, p < 0.01). Team effectiveness was positively correlated with occupational self-efficacy (r = 0.617, p<0.01). Occupational self-efficacy and work experience show significant impact on perceived team effectiveness (β = 0.552, p<0.001) and (β = -1.761, p<0.005). There is a significant difference in the relationship between self esteem and team effectiveness of the employees in terms of gender. For men the correlation between self esteem and team effectiveness was quiet high (rxy=0.551, p<0.01). But for females, there was no correlation between self esteem and team effectiveness (rxy=0.454, p>0.01).