Leadership and Self-Confidence

This chapter by Granite College Business and Management professor Ruth Axelrod is from the book Leadership Today: Practices for Personal and Professional Performance. The reading reviews the connection of leadership with the two types of self confidence – general self confidence and specific self confidence.

From the chapter’s abstract:

Self-confidence has two aspects: general self-confidence, which is a stable personality trait that develops in early childhood, and specific self-confidence, which is a changing mental and emotional state associated with the specific task or situation at-hand. We develop both types of self-confidence through automatic, mostly unconscious, internal dialogues whereby we make judgments about ourselves based on our experiences and others’ feedback. While both types of self-confidence profoundly affect our thoughts, emotions, and behavior, our levels of general self-confidence are important primarily in new and unusual circumstances while our specific self-confidence is pertinent to our everyday performance. High levels of both types are essential for effective leadership and enable the leader to influence his collaborators, or followers, to build task-specific self-confidences that can strengthen their job performance. This chapter includes instructions for a conscious mental process called self-leadership, which effective leaders routinely employ and through which we each can learn to positively influence our internal dialogues so that we, too, can build on our innate abilities and develop specific self-confidences to do what we choose.

Axelrod, Ruth H.. (2017). Leadership and Self-Confidence. 10.1007/978-3-319-31036-7_17.

The full text of the chapter can be downloaded for free from ResearchGate.