Self-Leadership and Positive Psychology - Essay Example

Title Unit: MGN442 Assignment 1 Due Date: Your name and student number Word Count Introduction The goal of this paper is to provide a critique of peer reviewed literature pertaining to self-leadership and positive psychology literature. Key authors discussed are identified in the literature and the main findings including difference personality traits. Self-leadership is based on self-influence, self-control and self-management theories which has gained significant popularity and also inspired potential for application in modern organisation. This means that it is a process through which people influence themselves to achieve the self-motivation and self-motivation so as to enable them perform in desirable ways. Positive psychology on the other hand is based on the social learning theory and social cognitive theory. Social learning is a theory which explains that how people can influence their own, motivation, cognition and behavior. Social cognition theory is one that explains that there is a continuous interaction between people and their environment and other behavioral outcomes. These are means of information and motivation. This means that how self-leaders think and behave is explained in the self-leadership theory. Self-leadership is a process of self-influence that is facilitated through the use of both behavioral and cognitive strategies. Self-leadership will focus mostly on three main strategies that include behavior, natural reward and constructive thought pattern (Greenblatt, 2002). Behavior focused strategies shall comprise on self-goal setting, self-reward, self-observation and self-punishment. These strategies are also intended to strengthen positive and desirable behavior like job performance and team performance. As a manager, behavior focused strategy will assist me in achieving performance and getting rid of unpleasant behavior. Just in the same way, natural reward strategies shall also focus on tasks that are intrinsically motivating. These strategies can also include the focusing of attention on more satisfying or rewarding aspects of a given job or task instead of the unpleasant aspect of-leadership (Hofstede, 2001). As a leader I am also called upon to lead my team to the right direction, this is what positive leadership is all about. Positive leadership is about having a good vision, passion about work, integrity and good communication skills. Positive leaderships is also about proper development qualities that helps one to solve problems and encourage follower or co-worker to give respect to the leader. Critical analysis of Self-leadership and Positive Psychology Self-leadership is importance as it provides one with a professional ability to find a goal and to a goal. In order for me to be a good leader, Self-leadership in marketing is very important as it enables me to learn to develop a strategy with will inspire others to join and help in putting the marketing strategy in to action. Self-leadership is mostly influenced by personal values and organizational values as well. Individual values will depend on the set of personal belief, experience and knowledge. A good leader is one who is able to maintain a balance between values of the individual and organization in which they have worked. Good leadership is also based on the vision of the organization, this is a guiding vision which provides a direction for the future and also helps one to plan and meet all the goals of the work. Self-leadership is also requires that one has a passion in what one does. This is important as it inspires and supports one to attain the goal, self-leadership is also about giving oneself credit for a job well done, one must be able to plan and meet with the goal. There must also be integrity in what one does, one must be honest and exercise self-maturity. However, there are quality that grow in a person through experience (H.Zhao & Seibert, 2006). Leadership techniques Leadership techniques are important as they help in forming practical steps that will enable one be able to implement and reflect on personal development. There are several techniques that can use in self-leadership. One of the techniques is also the Behavior focused techniques: this technique is important as it assist the individual to increase personal awareness so as to facilitate behavioral management especially one that is related to some of the pleasant tasks. Behavior focused technique can include self-observation, self-goal setting, self-reward, and self-queuing (Katz, 2004). Natural reward technique: This is a technique that is used to create a situation whereby a leader is motivated or rewarded by finding fun in what one does. The two natural reward strategies involve first of all building more pleasant and enjoyable feature in a given activity so that the task can become naturally rewarding. The other strategy calls for shaping perceptions through focusing once attention away from the unpleasant aspects of a task and refocussing it on tasks that are inherently rewarding. These two techniques are more likely to create feelings of being competent as a leader. Constructive thought technique: This is a technique that is designed to facilitate the formation of constructive thought patterns and other ways of thinking positively in order to increase performance. One of the ways that constructive thought techniques help in self-leadership is that it helps to identify and replace dysfunctional beliefs and assumptions. This is also important in helping to practice mental imagery and positive self-talk. It is important that a person examines ones thought patterns, replacing dysfunctional irrational beliefs and a more constructive thought process (H. Zhao & Seibert, 2006). Personality traits beneficial in a marketing career The best trait is to be able to be an open minded person and optimistic. This is important as it helps one to learn to consider other people’s ideas and thoughts. Most of the time, one needs to look at other people are competitive, thus should always strive to improve to be the best. It encourages one to become critical. It is also important to avoid being judgmental of other people, and less critical of other since it may not allow me to be able to deal with problems positively (Williams, 2007). It is also important that one act differently in different situations. An effective leadership is usually measured by work effectiveness which is also strongly related to empowerment. I marketers need to deal with clients on a daily basis. As a leader in marketing career I have to provide and optimum customer care to clients. One also need to have proper communication skills, this is because communication is one of the most important skills of any leader. In practicing self-leadership, one should practice positive communication skills. Being a leader, one should deal with customers and his team positively. There should be a two way communication which is important to improve interaction and relations with the staff. The leader should also have the skills to communicate with his team when planning, encouraging them to work and in discussing the challenges that come with work. If a leader fails to have proper communication skills, then one may not be able to encourage the team to fulfil its goals. The skill holds staffs together and their communication with each other become free flow in both directions. For effective communication a leader should be honest, approachable, open and good at listening. It indicates that, during practice a leader has to be honest to staffs and also be ready to listen their problems, not just at briefings and assessments of care, but also at handovers and any other time. It is also necessary for a good leader to be open in decision so the staffs can accept the decisions. According to Snyder & Lopez, (2010), Positive psychology is another personal trait in which individual leaders may differ greatly from one another. Some individuals appear to be happy and content all the time when dealing with employees and customers, while others appear to be generally depressed, discontent, and on edge. These differences undoubtedly relate in part to the circumstances in which these people find themselves. However, happiness is possible even under the most trying of conditions. In the world of marketing one may feel that happiness and depression are emotions over which they have little or no control, but recent advances in the field of psychology suggest that happiness may have more to do with the way we interact with the world around us than with the actual circumstances in which we find ourselves. The other personality trait that one should have as a leader is optimism in what one does, it is one of the ways to change perceptions of the external environment to increase individual happiness. Specifically, individuals identify their ‘signature strengths’. These are strengths that people already possess to varying degrees and include things such as creativity, persistence and humor. The key component is to learn to identify a set of signature strengths and then practice these Strengths on a regular basis. By routinely utilizing signature strengths, marketers can build a business with a unique identity and culture, and interact more positively with their world. Furthermore, entrepreneurs become better equipped to deal with and proactively react to the negative things that can happen in business dealings, thus reducing experiences of negative emotions and increasing happiness with their career choices (Williams, 2007). Personality and Self-Leadership: Personality is one of the most fundamental ways in which people differ from one another. Personality may be described as the relatively stable pattern of traits and characteristics that help to shape a person’s behavior and make the person unique. Personality may also influence life and career choices, work performance, and entrepreneurial behavior. This means that increased understanding of personality could help our understanding of entrepreneurial behavior. Zhao and Seibert (2006) conducted a meta-analysis on the relationship between the big five personality factors and entrepreneurship roles versus managerial roles and reported interesting results. Entrepreneurs—defined as “the founder, owner, and manager of a small business and whose principal purpose is growth —scored significantly higher on Conscientiousness and Openness to Experience; significantly lower on Neuroticism and Agreeableness; and they reported no difference for Extraversion between entrepreneurs and Managers. Judge, Jackson, Shaw, Scott, & Rich, (2011) conducted a meta-analysis on the relationship of self-efficacy and personality with work performance. Their conclusion recommended the importance of studying individual differences that must be taken into consideration in research studies of cognition and work performance. Unlike optimism and happiness, which can be to some extend changed and shaped with self-leadership knowledge and skills, personality characteristics are thought to remain fairly stable and constant over time. Nevertheless, psychological research suggests that personality is related to self-leadership in important and interesting ways. Personality characteristics play a large role in determining predispositions to be natural Self-leaders or if an individual needs to learn and practice to develop self-leadership skills. Zhao Greenblatt, (2002) recommend that “personality must be considered as one important component of a multidimensional model of the variables, processes, and environmental factors affecting entrepreneurship and new venture creation.” In the next section we will provide a brief overview of the relationships between self-leadership and several key personality characteristics as they relate to entrepreneurship and the new venture creation process. Table 1. Survey statistics between introvert and Extrovert: True or false test INSTRUMENT FINDINGS SD Least Difference Mean Learnings t-(207) Introvert 1.96 3.60 5.3 0.03 p Extrovert 1.98 3.92 5.39 .73 The above T-test table shows an independent result that was carried out to examine the different between two personality traits. The analysis for this hypothesis indicates that although there is a difference between the performance of an introvert and an extrovert marketing student on different test formats, the difference is actually not statistically significant. The researcher performed the T-Test in order to find out whether there is a difference between the personality tendencies of introverts and extroverts marketing students on one hand, and their performance when it came to multiple choice and true or false tests on the other perspective. According to these findings, there is actually no significant difference between introversion and extroversion dimensional participants performance on these two types of tests despite the fact that the results indicated very minimal difference mean difference between introversion and extroversion in the marketing career. This is went hand in hand with past studies on personality and self-leadership which have more or less obtained the same results. This is because, most psychological phenomena are one of the most sophisticated concepts, which are of vague and intrinsic transactions with other phenomena. Conclusion These findings show that there is a difference between extroversion and introversion which is most prevalent when we look at the student as the problem and not the type of self-leadership the student can provide. However it is also wise to note that some students are usually shy and timid and unsure of themselves to make leadership in themselves. One might actually expect reciprocal relationships with constant interaction, suggesting that there probably exist temporal dimensions that could be related to the life-stages of both the individual and also related to specific personal growth stages. The individual level of relationships between self-leadership and various individual difference factors among entrepreneurs have been discussed (Hofstede, 2001). Lessons learnt from this essay convinces that self-leadership perspective provides marketing students with a way of better examining the person/environment interface in the entrepreneurship process. In addition, self-leadership offers personal strategies that marketing students can learn and put into practice to commence and grow their career, either as founder-owners of their own firms or within corporations or other large organizations as internal innovator entrepreneurs (H.Zhao & Seibert, 2006). Bibliography Greenblatt, E. (2002). Work-life balance:Wisdom or whining. Organisational dynamics, 1: 179. H.Zhao, & Seibert, S. (2006). The big five personality dimensions and entrepreneurial personality dimensions and entrepreneurial. Journal of Applied Psychology, 91(2), 259-271. Hofstede, G. (2001). Culture’s consequences:Comparing values, behaviors, institutions, and organizations across nations, (2nd ed.),. Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage. Judge, T., Jackson, C., Shaw, J., Scott, B., & Rich, B. (2011). Self Efficacy and work related performance: The integral role of individual differences. Journal of Applied Psychology, 92(1), 107-127. Katz, J. (2004). Modeling entrepreneurial career progressions: Concepts and considerations. Entrepreneurship: Theoryand Practice, , 19(2): 23-39. Snyder, C. C., & Lopez, S. J. (2010). Positive Psychology: The Scientific and Practical Explorations of Human Strengths. SAGE Publications, Inc; Second Edition edition. Williams, S. (2007). Personality and self leadership. Human Resource Management Review, 7, 139-155. Read More