Personality Theories

Abstract

Centering a personality theory on human cognitive capabilities has a critical implication. It highlights an individual's capacity to overcome environmental influences and animalistic emotional impulses and to gain control over the course of their lives (Cervone and Pervin, 2010).

Albert Bandura took his proposition a step further and hypothesized that a reciprocal relationship exists between the environment, the person, and the behavior of the person (Valence, 2011).

Rather than the person being an overpowering force, Bandura would imagine that the person is both a cause and effect of both the environment and their behavior and the reverse. The interesting part to me is the effect the one mechanism of the person, self-efficacy, has on performance and motivation. Bandura encouraged many studies to reveal how goals, performance, and self-efficacy impact future performance (Cervone and Pervin, 2010). This paper will also explore how Bandura's social cognitive theory influences and forms my understanding of personality in the workplace and in society.

Personality Theory Paper

Albert Bandura's Theory

Bandura studied the effects of goals and performance feedback on motivation. The hypothesis tested was that performance motivation reflects both the presence of goals and the awareness of how one is doing relative to standards: simply adopting goals, whether easy or personally challenging ones, without knowing how one is doing seems to have no appreciable motivational effect (Cervone and Pervin, 2010).

The actual act of setting goals has no effect on the external realization of those goals, unless there is some kind of performance feedback. Bandura found that the implementation of performance feedback and the initiation of goals only had a marginal effect on performance when compared to the effect of perceived self-efficacy, the belief and confidence that a person can perform a desired behavior (Elliot and Harackiewicz, 1996).

At the center of Bandura's social cognitive theory lies the concept of self-efficacy which plays a pivotal role in how the individual approaches goals, tasks and challenges. He concretely describes the aspects of his theory with emphasis on cognitive, self-regulatory, vicarious learning, self-reflective process in human adaptation and change (Mafalo, 2011).

Learning is something an individual does, not something that happens to them. No matter what process or experience is said to produce learning, what an individual has learned is what they can do afterwards; something they could not do before. The result is increased self-effectiveness and improved outcome expectancies, which make lasting behavior changes more likely (Boyce, 2011).

Self-efficacy appears to be the mediating variable between the settings of a goal, the feedback of past performance was most optimal when a person had performance feedback establishing past, sub-standard performance and high confidence (self-efficacy) that good performance can be attained. It has been established that previous performance and self-efficacy were the best predictors of back-diving performance in a group of 80 female college students. Bandura showed that performance feedback has a causal effect on future performance, as mediated by the psychological experience of self-efficacy (Feltz, 1982).

Self-efficacy beliefs means the belief in one's capabilities to organize and execute the sources of action required to manage prospective situations (Mafalo, 2011).

Workplace

Bandura's ideas are useful and applicable in the workplace. I have noticed at my present job there is no performance feedback, unless someone really messes up. Usually those feedbacks are negative. Without feedback no one knows how they are doing until things go awry. This leads to the belief that we cannot do anything right, and it makes it impossible to set and reach quantifiable goals. It is the self-efficacy judgments of possible attainment that fix on goal setting behaviors and future performance. I do perform well at tasks where I am challenged and the goals are achievable. I get extremely discouraged when the