The Importance Of Self-Efficacy In Personal And Professional Life

Discuss about the Professional Research and Communication for Psychological Things.
 

Person life influences by the product of varieties of influential things. Self-efficacy is a one the main product of psychological things, which plays crucial position in person life. Self-efficacy is a confidence, which lead to face difficulties and achieving the desire goal. (Bandura, 1995) explains that it "refers to beliefs in one's capabilities to organize and execute the courses of action required to manage prospective situations" (p. 2). Persons with high self-efficacy are able to plan effectively and successfully in completion of a task (Bandura, 1977). This type of person understands his/her believes and have capabilities to achieve the goal in any complex situation. In addition to this, a person with high self-efficacy does not worry about the task even the task is highly complicated. While a person with low self-efficacy run away from the complex task, and have low belief in their self-confidence and abilities. Consequently, this drive the person to unable of execution of goal in their life challenges.

 According to (Gecas, 2003), people behave in the way that executes their initial beliefs; thus, self-efficacy functions as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Suppose a first person with normal capability and experience in building of presentation slides for presentation, but has high confidence and belief, which gives the power to make excellent presentation slides for presentation. On the other hand, the second person with high numbers of experience and great talent in creating of presentation slides for presentation, but has low confidence lacks him/her in making of quality presentation slides for presentation. Because of second person with low self-efficacy, lacks the motivation and interest to build slides for presentation, depict the unable of execution of task. But the first person who has high self-efficacy, rise up the motivation to complete task without worrying of difficulties, ultimately, this development the career and process in life to achieve excellence. 

Self-efficacy highlights the impacts of every decision and confidence of person. One such example is student confident in understanding of lesson, problem solving, and performance in difficult task. Therefore, another case like, self-efficacy beliefs influence not only physical proficiency, as (Bandura, 1997) notes, however, it effects on prediction of opponent team, handling pressure, making of quick decision. Such as, a player having an effective performance in team determines achievement of goal.

Four constituents are use to judgment of self-efficacy: performance outcomes, vicarious experiences, verbal persuasion, and physiological feedback (Bandura, 1977).

Impact of Self-Efficacy on Performance Outcomes

Performance outcomes: This depends on the performance result of previous task whether positive or negative outcome. If the result was positive the performer likely to execute the positive performance in future task where as negative performance makes the adverse affect on his/her task performing. Therefore, this causes the failure of task in future.

Vicarious experiences: A person can watch another perform and then compare their competence with the other’s competence (Redmond, 2010). For example, a person succeed in their goal can be model for the other person. Therefore, the other person can learn from this outcome and enhance the self-efficacy in high level. However, if the person has a partner with negative and failure of case in past then this lower the person belief and their self-efficacy.

Verbal persuasion: According to (Redmond, 2010), self-efficacy is also influenced by encouragement and discouragement pertaining to an individual’s performance or ability to perform.                

For instance, a coach telling to his team that he believes his team in winning the game. This type verbal persuasion raises the self-efficacy of each team member to perform in high level. While if the coach tells the player about his low believe on his team, then this lead to lower of self-efficacy of team.

States of physiology (physiological feedback): This type of state defines the physiological effect on person performance, which can be visible to his/her physical body. For example, if a person giving the hard examination then the effect of exam reveals on his body like by facial expression, sweat and fear. Therefore, this lead the lower the self-efficacy but if person bypass the hard moment easily then he/she can deal the challenge with high motivation with high level of self-efficacy. Thus, controlling anxiety has the positive effect on self-efficacy level. 

The term self - efficacy has many definitions according to the different theories. 

• According to the social cognitive theory Psychologist Albert Bandura has defined self-efficacy as the peoples personal assessment or believes about own ability to succeed in getting a particular goal or in any particular situation. 

• According to social learning theory it may be defined as the learning or developing of a skill within a social group. It totally based on the interaction of an individual in the group with others and they can learn many things from each other. 

• According to Self-concept theory self – efficacy is how will people explain and recognize their own presence with the help of their own believes and resources. They will make some change based on self-learning from their success or failure. 

• According to Attribution theory self – efficacy defined as self-confidence of a person will always affected by the success and failure. 

So, overall self – efficacy may be defined ae the self – believes of a person about his own capabilities may lead to succeed in achieving a future goal or. 

Self – efficacy is very important for every human being because it affects the people thinking, behavior, feelings and so many things about themselves. There are 2 types of people one who have high sense of self- efficacy and other who have low sense of self – efficacy.

• Are more interested and focused in their every activity.
• They are quick learners and easily overcome to their mistake which they did in past.
• They always take challenges from any hard tasks. 

The people who have low self –efficacies – 

• Can easily loss faith and believes and have doubt on own capabilities.
• Also suffer with stress and depression.
• Always choose easy tasks instead of difficult tasks and they have more negative thoughts instead of focusing on their goals. 

Moreover, the people who have high self – efficacy get learn more as comparison to people who have low self – efficacy while ability levels are same in both types of people. Because they have different believes and strength about themselves. 

Influence of Self-Efficacy on Different Aspects of Life

Efficacy is a method of achieving something, to give the results. For example in medicines scientists ran a series of tests to check the efficacy of drugs while self – efficacy is a personal judgment which believes in someone efficacy to achieving a target and get positive result. 

1. Performance experience: - if you achieved any goal that means you focused on your task and did well. If sometimes you failed in your task but you never give up and tried again to do well.
2. Verbal – persuasion: - this tells us what people think about what they believe you are and they cannot do anything like you.
3. Imaginal performance: - it shows that when you do something and imagine about your success and failure.
4. Affective states and physical sensations: - sometimes your success and failure also depends on negative and positive moods  

Self-efficacy in sports is a widely discussed topic among researchers. In no other part of life they believe in one´s abilities can be examined as good as in sport with its rich history of successful athletes who believed in themselves and achieved great things. However, a great deal of literature has examined the effects of self-efficacy on the physical activity habits of every-day people, away from the performance of elite athletes. The motivation of the researchers was to produce valuable information for recreation planners to increase participation in sport and enhance overall health of the population (Cetinkalp & Turksoy, 2011).  

(Cetinkalp & Turksoy, 2011)Examined how self-efficacy influences the motivation of males to participate in soccer. Goal of this study was to understand self-efficacy and gain knowledge of how to get more children involved in sport. Each player´s self-efficacy level was determined through (Schwarzer & Jerusalem, 2010)scale cited in (Cetinkalp & Turksoy, 2011). The authors then tried to predict each participant’s participation level according to the generated data.  The findings of the study were that self-efficacy was strongly linked to individual energy and activity levels as well as team affiliation. Even though the researchers found no direct link between self-efficacy and participation, they stressed that the higher a players individual activity level was the higher was his participation rate. 

(Valois, Umstattd, Zullig, & Paxton, 2008) asked a very similar question but focused on the relationship between self-efficacy and the physical activity of high school adolescents. They developed their own self-efficacy scala but, just like Cetinkalp and Turksov, used questionnaires to collect data about physical levels and self-efficacy of the participants. The result indicated that a high number of high school students showed very low activity levels as well as low participation in sports. At the same time many students showed a low level of self-efficacy. Valois et al. see a connection between low self-efficacy and low participation in sports. However they were not able to determine which causes what and call for more research to be done on the topic.  

(Dinç, 2011) went into a bit more detail and examined the differences of self-efficacy of people participating in individual sports and people participating in team sports. The study found that people that participate in team sports show a higher level of self-efficacy than individual athletes which goes hand in hand with (Cetinkalp & Turksoy, 2011).Dinc´s research method was similar to the ones of his fellow researches. He used a well-established self-efficacy scale (Bing, 2007) and gathered data through questionnaires.

Self-Efficacy in Sports

Having had a glance at self-efficacy and its influence on different age groups, (Gilson & Curnock, 2012) examines the effect of self-efficacy on a particular sport: weightlifting. Gilson was able to prove the positive effect of self-efficacy on athlete´s strength. In comparison to the previous researches, Gilson didn’t only rely on questionnaires for the data collection of the athlete´s performances. He followed strength developments very precisely by continuously comparing lifted weight. Just like in the previous papers, Gilson found self-efficacy to be the most important factor to boost performance. He even suggested athletes who struggle with one particular weight to decrease the weight by a small proportion and do a couple of repetitions to quickly increase self-efficacy – after that the struggling weight should not be a problem anymore. 

The presented studies all agreed on self-efficacy to be a leading driver regarding physical activity levels for all age groups. However, most of the literature remained rather general and took an universal approach to examine the correlation between self-efficacy and sport involvement. 

More detailed research has to be undertaken to understand how self-efficacy affects the different phases of sport involvement from early stages to the maintenance phase (McAuley & Blissmer, 2000). Furthermore, different types of activities require different kinds of self-efficacy as (Dinç, 2011)comparison of self-efficacy for team and individual sports has proven. It will be important to further these studies and provide information what kind of self-efficacy works most effectively in the various niches of the dynamic world of sport.  

Conclusion

Self-efficacy is research for long time for its impact on various aspects of life. It is because self efficacy affects the people’s feelings behaviour and thinking. The paper had reviewed various scientific studies on influence of self-efficacy in sports participation and physical activity levels. It can be concluded from the literature review that the self-efficacy functions as a self-fulfilling prophecy. It increases motivation to participate in the sports like Soccer or physical activities.   It is found to influence the physical proficiency that drives effective performance and improves health. Self-efficacy is however linked with higher activity level of an individual which determines the rate of participation, in both children and adults.  It was interesting to found the change in the self-efficacy when one plays sorts in team and individually. The former had higher level of self-efficacy. Self efficacy boost performance as it increases strength of the sports personnel. It can be concluded that self-efficacy in all age groups  is strongly correlated with the sport participation and physical activity.  

References :-

Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy mechanism in human agency. Psychological review, 84(2), 191-2015.

Bandura, A. (1995). Exercise of personal and collective efficacy in changing societies. Edited by: Bandura A. Self-efficacy in changing societies. 1-45. Retrieved from https://books.google.com/books?id=ZL7qN4jullUC&dq=editions%3AitTbpOYuAYgC&source=gbs_book_other_versions

Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. Macmillan. Retrieved from https://search.proquest.com.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/docview/619147930?accountid=13158

Cetinkalp, Z. K., & Turksoy, A. (2011). Goal orientation and self-efficacy as predictors of male adolescent soccer players' motivation to participate. Social Behavior and Personality: an international journal, 39(7), 925-934.

Dinç, Z. (2011). Social self-efficacy of adolescents who participate in individual and team sports. Social Behavior and Personality: an international journal, 39(10), 1417-1423.

Gecas, V. (2003). Self-agency and the life course. In Handbook of the life course. Boston, MA: Springer. doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-306-48247-2_17

Gilson, T. A., & Curnock, L. E. (2012). An examination of athletes' self-efficacy and strength training effort during an entire off-season. he Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research, 26(2), 443-451.

McAuley, E., & Blissmer, B. (2000). Self-efficacy determinants and consequences of physical activity. Exerc Sport Sci Rev, 28(2), 85-88.

Redmond, B. F. (2010). Self-efficacy theory: Do I think that I can succeed in my work? Work attitudes and motivation. The Pennsylvania State University, World Campus. Retrieved from https://cms.psu.edu

Schwarzer, R., & Jerusalem, M. (2010). The general self-efficacy scale (GSE). Anxiety, Stress, and Coping,. 329-345.

Valois, R. F., Umstattd, M. R., Zullig, K. J., & Paxton, R. J. (2008). Physical Activity Behaviors and Emotional Self?Efficacy: Is There a Relationship for Adolescents?  Journal of school health, 78(6), 321-327.