To what extent your work place shapes your self-efficacy?

Goddard et al. (2004) highlighted the relationship between self-efficacy beliefs (SEB) and collective efficacy beliefs (CEB), and they supported their claim by citing correlational studies. But how that association is supposed to be? When the authors described previous literature, they reported numbers about strength of the associations among variables, but this says little about mechanism. Goddard et al. asserted that there is a reciprocal relation between SEB and CSB, and in the final part of their article they suggest that “The more teachers have the opportunity to influence instructionally relevant school decisions, the more likely a school is to be characterized by a robust sense of collective efficacy” p. 10. I got that and agree with this idea. Here, the authors are talking about one directionality of the relationship, from SEB to CSB, but what about the direction from CSB to SEB? The associations among the components of their model are vague to answer this question.

What if CEB do not influence people SEB at all, but the high associations among these concepts are explained by confounding variables? One confounding variable that come to my mind is people’s decisions where to work. As we have heard many times in class and in the context of different examples, we tend to engage in activities in which we have a high sense of efficacy and avoid activities in which we have a low sense of competence. If this is true, SEB should also influence our selection of work places; we select organizations where we can perform activities in which we are good at. If so, it is very likely that people’s SEB will correlate with the organization’s CEB, and this does not mean that CEB influences SEB. How do we know about organization’s CEB before working there? I think that we can find indirect information in the organization’s mission, vision, goals, values, and activities that employees do.