Leadership Self-Efficacy in Small Groups: Validation of a Self-Report Measure

Abstract

To remain competitive and to deal successfully with the ever-increasing complexities, contemporary organizations are increasingly relying on small work groups and teams to accomplish their goals. The exponential increase of team research appearing in the Journal of Applied Psychology in the past decade is evidence of this trend. Thus, researchers have called for studies that explore the issue of group context, contingencies, and boundary conditions to gain a comprehensive understanding of what makes groups function optimally. The present study responds to this call by emphasizing group size as a context variable that contributes to perceptions of leadership self-efficacy and, ultimately, leadership outcomes. Specifically, the objective of the present study was to validate a new measure of small group leadership self-efficacy by building largely on social cognitive theory.

Data were obtained from 1,424 participants enrolled in five unique leadership programs. Although some validation hypotheses did not receive support, the overall results show some promise for the measure as partial support was found for the proposed construct- and criterion-related validities. Because scale validation is not a single event, future research should pursue additional validation avenues with the objective of further building the nomological network of the small group leadership self-efficacy construct, thereby, contributing to organizational research. The implications of the results and future research directions are discussed.