Search results

The concept of “Thought Self‐Leadership” involves individual self‐influence through cognitive strategies that focus on self‐dialogue, mental imagery, beliefs and assumptions, and thought patterns. A plethora of studies from various fields including management, counseling psychology, sports psychology, education, and communication, address the effect of these Thought Self‐Leadership cognitive strategies on cognitions and behaviors. This research provides consistent support for the relationship between constructive self‐leadership of these cognitive processes and enhanced performance. The application of these cognitive strategies to the entrepreneurship domain, however, is sparse. We propose that the application of these principles to the entrepreneurial process offers the potential to enhance individual performance and mental states for both practicing and aspiring entrepreneurs. Propositions derived from the proposed framework are developed to serve as catalysts for empirically testing the applicability of Thought Self‐Leadership to the entrepreneurship context.

One major stream of organizational change research focuses on the relationship between senior level employees' cognitions and organizations' responses to change. It is argued here that the cognitive component is important towards how all members (not only top executives) of organizations react and respond to change. In this article, I examine the application of a cognitive process recently introduced into the organizational behavior literature, thought self‐leadership, to the organizational change process. Particularly, this application will focus on how thought self‐leadership can enhance employees' perceptions of specific organizational change. Additionally, a training‐based field experiment is discussed to illustrate and provide support for the arguments proposed.

In this study, self-leadership strategy serves as a self-regulatory mediating mechanism of individual differences in predicting individual creativity because it is related to actions intended to lead their own goal-directed activities. The purpose of this paper is to explore the boundary conditions of the effect of regulatory focus on employee self-leadership behaviors.

Considering the contextual influence, cross-level moderating effect of empowering leadership on the relationship between the promotion (prevention) focus and self-leadership has been examined. The research data were collected from 441 employees of 65 work teams from three software companies located in Northern Taiwan. A time-lagged design by implementing three time surveys was applied to minimize potential problems of cross-sectional design. At Time 1, employees completed the measures of promotion focus, prevention focus, empowering leadership, and individual-level control variables. At Time 2, employees reported the extent of their self-leadership at work. In the final survey, team leaders assessed the individual employee creativity.

This study concludes several findings. When self-leading behavior-focused strategies are considered as mediators, the indirect relationships that promotion focus and prevention focus had with individual creativity were confirmed. As an influential team-level indicator, empowering leadership could moderate the relatedness between employees promotion-focused strategies and behavior-focused strategies that positively influenced on individual creativity.

In this study, responding to the call by De Stobbeleir et al. (2011) to examine how employees actively manage their creative performance, the author zoomed in on self-leadership strategies and how these strategies relate to actual creative performance.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a thorough review of self‐leadership literature past and present, including a historical overview of how the concept was created and expanded as well as a detailed look at more recent self‐leadership research trends and directions. The paper also presents a theoretical and conceptual explanation and differentiation of the self‐leadership concept relative to other related motivational, personality, and self‐influence constructs.

Self‐leadership research and related literatures of motivation, personality and self‐influence are discussed and described in order to present the current state of the self‐leadership body of knowledge and to suggest future directions to explore and study.

It is suggested that self‐leadership is a normative model of self‐influence that operates within the framework of more descriptive and deductive theories such as self‐regulation and social cognitive theory.

While self‐leadership research composes an impressive body of knowledge, it is a domain of study that has been under‐investigated in some aspects, both empirically and conceptually.

This paper suggests several future directions that researchers can undertake to advance self‐leadership knowledge.

This paper fills a void in the organizational literature by reviewing the body of self‐leadership knowledge, by stating how self‐leadership is a distinctive theory in its own, and by presenting directions for future self‐leadership research.

The organisational literature suggests a plethora of techniques available to managers to enhance their managerial effectiveness (e.g., planning tools, decision‐making guidelines, etc.). However, an often‐overlooked skill that could assist managers in overcoming obstacles in their daily jobs involves the self‐management of their cognitive processes. In fact, a leading psychologist has written, “One of the most significant findings in psychology in the last twenty years is that individuals can choose the way they think,” (Seligman, 1991, p.8). It has been suggested that managers can better lead themselves and work more effectively with others by applying strategies that help them to manage or control their thoughts. More productive thinking and improved performance are the payoffs. This theory, labelled Thought Self‐Leadership (TSL), centres on employees' establishing and maintaining constructive desirable thought patterns (Neck & Manz, 1992; Manz & Neck, 1991; Neck & Milliman, 1994). This perspective suggests that just as we tend to develop behavioural habits that are both functional and dysfunctional, we also develop habits (or patterns) in our thinking that influence our perceptions, the way we process information, and the choices we make in an almost automatic way.

Discusses the nature of diversity in the work environment and its impact on performance. Examines how organizations have attempted to create an atmosphere in which diverse groups can flourish. Proposes an alternative form of training to help all employees cope with the challenges of a diverse workplace. Suggests that thought self‐leadership is a process which can assist employees in accomplishing goals of wellbeing and high performance. This self‐regulatory form of leadership is built on the premiss that one’s mind has a powerful influence over not just thoughts, but feelings and actions as well. Concludes that thought self‐leadership can be used as a tool to help all employees cope with an ever‐changing work environment and to focus on the positive aspects of a diverse workforce.

Seeks to understand how differences in national cultures impact on the understanding and meaning of the concept of self‐leadership and its application.

First, research at the intersection of culture and leadership and Hofstede's culture framework are reviewed. Then the main components of self‐leadership theory are introduced, and how Hofstede's framework can be used to re‐analyze them given differences across cultures is discussed.

While self‐leadership remains, in general, a valid concept, its understanding and application is likely to differ across cultures. Specifically, high power distance raises the importance of the symbolic value of tasks and correspondent covert processes of self‐leadership, high uncertainty avoidance makes more explicit the importance of non‐rational and intuition‐based thought processes, collectivism shows the relevance of social relations, femininity reiterates the importance of social relations and non‐rational processes, and long‐term orientation introduces the importance of making time an explicit element.

There is a need for further research on self‐leadership that investigates the roles of social and cultural relations, communication and language, multilevel interdependencies, and ethics. Empirically there is need for developing a self‐leadership instrument that is relevant and applicable across cultures.

This paper should facilitate appreciation of a contingency perspective of self‐leadership that requires different modes of application across cultures.

This paper helps fill a gap in the self‐leadership literature. In particular, it can facilitate greater understanding of this concept in cultures other than the USA, where it originated.

The purpose of this paper is to present a set of strategies for effective managerial self‐change within the substantive setting of a cleaned‐up bureaucracy.

Using inductive methodology, data have been collected and analysed from a large Australian public‐sector bureaucracy by means of 26 personal interviews conducted between 2000 and 2002.

A conceptual model of managerial self‐change is presented stressing the importance of both cognitive and behavioural strategies within the context of an “awareness‐understanding‐accomplishment” feedback loop and learning process. The model incorporates and extends some of the major concepts in the extant literature on thought self‐leadership and learned optimism by incorporating attributional analysis into managerial cognitive thought patterns. The findings also suggest refinements to the concept of managerial credibility within cleaned‐up bureaucracies.

Findings are derived on the basis of a substantive case study of one cleaned‐up bureaucracy in a particular country. Further research needs to expand this base to encompass other organizations in a wider range of countries across different cultures.

The model draws attention to how the behaviour of organisational subordinates within cleaned‐up bureaucracies is significantly affected by the attitudes and actions of their immediate manager. By adopting a set of strategies contained with the conceptual model, managers can learn how to change themselves.

The paper departs from the prevalent tendency of the extant literature to employ laboratory or experimentally derived data by using systematically gathered and grounded empirical data in a naturalistic organisational setting. Additionally, the findings have more to say about the nuances of a particular organisational context rather than generalising across numerous contextual environments.

This study aims to address the need to study salespersons’ thought self-leadership (TSL) and its effectiveness through the interplay of self-efficacy, skills and behavior at the individual level. It also advances the agenda of integrating self-leadership into marketing literature.

A model was tested using survey data collected from salespeople within pharmaceutical companies located in India and other Asian countries. A structural equation model was used to test the hypotheses.

The results suggest an interesting interplay between a salesperson’s TSL and his/her sales performance. The results also demonstrate the relationship between TSL and self-efficacy and the mediation mechanism through which self-efficacy influences sales performance. Results support the role of TSL as a distal predictor of performance and delineate the complexity of the mediation mechanism through theoretical grounding and empirical evidence.

The research suggests that a salesperson’s TSL relates positively with the sales performance through three process variables; self-efficacy, selling skills and adaptive selling behavior. The results should encourage managers to leverage salesperson’s TSL strategies to build a self-leading sales force and optimize supervision cost. Moreover, training the sales force for enhanced TSL has immediate payoffs in terms of increased selling effectiveness. The study also discusses theoretical implications.

By examining TSL in the sales context, the study makes an original contribution to the extant literature. The results of the study enrich the extant information on self-leadership and sales performance linkages by suggesting a mediation mechanism and proposing an integrated framework with selling skills and adaptive selling behavior.

Despite the popularity and potential of self‐leadership strategies in modern organizations, no acceptably valid and reliable self‐leadership assessment scale has heretofore been developed. The present study tests the reliability and construct validity of a revised self‐leadership measurement scale created on the basis of existing measures of self‐leadership. Results from an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) demonstrate significantly better reliability and factor stability for the revised scale in comparison to existing instruments. Further, results from a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) utilizing structural equation modeling techniques demonstrate superior fit for a higher order factor model of self‐leadership, thus providing evidence that the revised scale is measuring self‐leadership in a way that is harmonious with self‐leadership theory. Based on these results, the revised scale appears to be a reasonably reliable and valid instrument for the measurement of self‐leadership skills, behaviors, and cognitions. Implications for future empirical self‐leadership research are discussed.