Abstract
This paper describes a field experiment with a self-leadership training aimed at helping human service professionals to improve their detached concern and proactivity. Whereas detached concern refers to a state in which human service professionals blend compassion with emotional distance in their interaction with clients, proactivity refers to self-starting and change-oriented behaviour to enhance personal or organizational effectiveness. Based on self-leadership theory, we hypothesized that self-leadership training can enhance detached concern and proactivity. Moreover, based on behavioural plasticity theory, we hypothesized that training participants who are low in occupational self-efficacy are more susceptible to the external influence of self-leadership training, than individuals with higher levels of occupational self-efficacy. We conducted a field experiment with a sample of 223 human service professionals who were either assigned to a training group (n = 94), or a wait-list control group (n = 129). In a 3-month follow-up study, we found that self-leadership training had a positive effect on detached concern and that the intervention was especially effective for participants with low to medium initial levels of pretraining occupational self-efficacy. However, the intervention did not affect participants' level of proactivity. This study adds to the literature on workplace learning by demonstrating the potential of a self-leadership training for the transfer maintenance of newly developed soft skills (i.e., detached concern and proactive behaviour) to the workplace and by pinpointing occupational self-efficacy as an individual predisposition that influences training success.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 281-300 |
Number of pages | 20 |
Journal | International journal of Training and Development |
Volume | 27 |
Issue number | 2 |
Early online date | 2023 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2023 |
Keywords
- Work role performance
- Emotional socialization
- Job-performance
- Things happen
- Soft skills
- Behavior
- Intervention
- Motivation
- Efficacy
- Stress