Self-Efficacy : The Foundation of Service Employee’s Performance

What influences a service provider to turnaround a challenging situation to a desirable outcome of a satisfied customer? Are the challenging situations just isolated examples that have no meaning beyond their unique circumstances, or might there be some common elements, which if identified could provide important information to the contact employees?

Self-efficacy was first introduced as a core concept in Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory that deals with mechanisms of self-regulation, self-motivation, behavioral control and interaction with the environment in a dynamic fashion. This theory postulates that individuals are proactive and self-regulating to organize and execute courses of action required to attain performances. Self-efficacy is an important topic in the organizational behavior because of its strong relationship with goal commitment, task learning, persistence of effort and performance. The importance of self-efficacy lies in its ability to affect motivation and increase employee performance.

Self-efficacy is operationally defined as a personal judgment of how well one can execute courses of action required to deal with prospective situations to attain designated goals. These judgments affect service employees’ motivation and behavior. Service employees weigh, integrate, and evaluate information combined with personal and situational factors about their capabilities to perform. They subsequently decide on a course of action and exert efforts to perform the task accordingly. Individuals who perceive themselves as highly efficacious activate sufficient effort to produce the outcomes, whereas those who perceive low self-efficacy are likely to cease their efforts prematurely and fail the task. As self-efficacy increases, service employees exert more effort, takes initiatives, learn about their job, the organization, and themselves when faced with service-related obstacles, thus resulting in high levels of service performance.

Self-efficacy is developed through four key sources of information that influence self-efficacy in the social learning processes : personal mastery experiences (performance accomplishments), vicarious experience (modeling), verbal persuasion, and physiological states.

i)        Personal mastery experience is defined as repeated performance accomplishments. Change will depend on how service employees process the information resulting from that past service delivery performance. For instance, after a service employee completes a customer’s request, they interpret and evaluate the results obtained, and judgments of competence are created or revised according to those interpretations. When they believe that their efforts have been successful, their confidence to accomplish similar or related service tasks is raised; when they believe that their efforts failed to produce the effect desired, confidence to succeed in similar endeavors is diminished. Frequent successes in service delivery leads to higher self-efficacy, and consistent failure experiences lower it. Service employees who have earned compliments and awards for their service delivery will typically believe themselves capable in this area for years to come.

ii)       Vicarious experience (modeling) of observing competent service employees taking a similar task successfully strengthens self-efficacy. People learn by observing the behavior-consequence patterns of others. Observing the successes and failures of other service employees perceived as similar in capability contributes to beliefs in one’s own capabilities to raise their performance (“If he/she can do it, so can I”). Colleagues judged to have similar skills and who are observed to be successful at a task strengthen efficacy beliefs of the observer.

iii)      Verbal persuasion (e.g. verbal encouragement and progress feedback) that one can perform the task successfully. Encouragement from supervisors, colleagues and customers can boost the service employees' confidence in their capabilities to deliver quality service. Verbal persuasion is commonly used because of the ease with which it can be dispensed. If employees receive encouragements (e.g. “You can do this” and “You can do better next time” reassuring statements), they are more likely to exert greater effort and succeed in the given task.

iv)      Physiological states (e.g. heart rate, feelings of anxiety, stress, pain, fatigue, mood) may influence service employee’s self-efficacy. An individual in an emotional aroused state (e.g. high stress while serving a demanding customer) may interpret the arousal as anxiety, fear and feel vulnerable to higher probability of anticipated service failure. High anxiety can undermine self-efficacy. Staff who experience a feeling of dread when attending to a particular customer likely interpret their apprehension as evidence of lack of capabilities in serving this difficult customer. In general, increasing service employees’ physical and emotional well-being and reducing negative emotional states strengthens self-efficacy.

 The self-efficacy of service providers will play an important role in shaping customers' perceptions of the service encounter. When customers are served by employees who believe strongly in their own abilities to deliver, they are likely to receive higher-quality service.  Managerial strategy should focus on strengthening the self-efficacy of the service employees through learning opportunities of personal mastery experiences (performance accomplishments), vicarious experience (modelling), verbal persuasion, and physiological states to achieve the desired service performance.