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Article Excerpt
Our purpose in this paper is to provide a comprehensive examination of recent research into individual differences in order to better understand the future promise of self-leadership as a concept and a research subject for entrepreneurship. We briefly present a description of self-leadership research and then proceed to describe and contrast the self-leadership concept relative to other related motivational and self-influence constructs including: optimism, happiness, psychological flow, consciousness, personality models, self-monitoring, the need for autonomy, emotional intelligence, and diversity factors including age, gender, and cultural differences, and the work-life interface. We relate these concepts to entrepreneurship, and conclude with suggestions for future research on the relationships between self-leadership, individual differences, and entrepreneurship.
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The concept of self-leadership (Manz, 1986; Manz & Neck, 2004) represents an individual level process perspective through which men and women influence themselves to control their own actions and thinking. The goal of increased self-leadership for entrepreneurs is for these individuals to more effectively lead themselves by learning and applying specific behavioral and cognitive strategies to improve their lives and their entrepreneurial business ventures. We propose that the process of self-leadership is inherent in successful entrepreneurship and can be developed by both nascent entrepreneurs just beginning a business and veteran entrepreneurs who may be struggling with taking their businesses to higher achievements in sales growth and firm profitability.
Self-leadership was first developed and proposed by Manz (1983; 1986) as an extension of self-management theory (Manz, 1990, Manz & Sims, 1980, 1986, 1987, 1989, 1994). Over the past two decades, the self-leadership concept has been extensively written about as evidenced by the large number of practitioner oriented self-leadership books and articles on the subject (e.g., Blanchard, 1995; Cashman, 1995; Manz, 1991; Manz & Sims, 2001; Sims & Manz, 1996; Waitley, 1995). This article will begin with a brief overview of the self-leadership research (see Neck & Houghton, 2006, for an extensive research review and discussion of self-leadership) and then proceed to discuss how recent research on individual differences can extend our understanding of self-leadership within the broader research context of entrepreneurship.
Although there are many similarities in the general entrepreneurship process within the new venture process including initial startups, struggling or rapidly growing small businesses, and large corporations, there are also many significant differences, especially regarding the political factors and personal motivations inherent in larger organizations as opposed to smaller, growing companies (Morris & Kuratko, 2002). Startups and burgeoning enterprises must struggle with issues of gaining legitimacy and support among many stakeholders including customers, employees, suppliers, individual or venture investors, and banks or other lending institutions.
Persistence and maintaining a positive attitude through these challenging times can sometimes spell the difference between entrepreneurial success and business failure. Furthermore, entrepreneurs must find this drive from within. While lenders and investors exert some influence and pressure on performance, ultimately the survival of the business rests on the founding entrepreneur's shoulders. We propose that entrepreneurs will be assisted through these venture startup and growth stages by understanding and developing personal strategies to remain disciplined and focused on their goals. Fortunately, self-leadership is a motivational area of psychology that offers these skills and strategies to entrepreneurs to remain steadfast and purposeful during these times. In this paper, we present self-leadership as a process for attaining the mindset and behaviors needed for starting and building a new business. In the following section we provide an overview of self-leadership, which will later be applied to entrepreneurship.
Self-Leadership Overview
Self-leadership describes a self-influence process through which people can and do achieve the self-direction and self-motivation necessary to perform their tasks and work (Manz, 1986, Manz & Neck, 2004). Self-leadership consists of specific behavioral and cognitive strategies designed to positively influence personal effectiveness. These strategies are generally clustered into the three primary categories: (1) behavior-focused strategies, (2) natural reward strategies, and (3) constructive thought pattern strategies (Manz & Neck, 2004; Manz & Sims, 2001; Prussia, Anderson, & Manz, 1998).
(1) Behavior-focused strategies endeavor to assist an individual to increase their self-awareness in order to facilitate behavioral management, especially the management of behaviors related to necessary but often unpleasant tasks (Manz & Neck, 2004). The behavior-focused strategies include self-observation, self-goal setting, self-reward or self-punishment, and self-cueing. Self-observation involves focusing on an individual's awareness of how, when, and why they engages in specific behaviors. This type of self-awareness is a necessary first step toward changing or eliminating ineffective or unproductive behaviors (Mahoney & Arnkoff, 1978, 1979; Manz & Sims, 1980; Manz & Neck, 2004). With accurate information regarding current behavior and performance levels, individuals can more effectively set effective behavior altering goals for themselves (Manz, 1986; Manz & Neck, 2004; Manz & Sims, 1980).
An extensive research literature suggests that the process of setting challenging and specific goals can significantly increase individual performance levels (Locke & Latham, 1990). Rewards set by an individual along with self-set goals, can aid significantly in energizing the effort necessary to accomplish the goals (Mahoney & Arnkoff, 1978, 1979; Manz & Sims, 1980; Manz & Neck, 2004). Self-rewards may be simple or intangible such as mentally congratulating oneself for an important accomplishment, or more concrete like a special vacation at the completion of a difficult project. Self-punishment or self-correcting feedback can consist of a positively framed and introspective examination of failures and undesirable behaviors leading to the reshaping of such behaviors. However, the excessive use of self-punishment involving self-criticism and guilt can be detrimental to performance and should be avoided (Manz & Sims, 2001). Finally, concrete environmental cues can serve as an effective means of encouraging constructive behaviors and reducing or eliminating destructive ones (Manz & Neck, 2004; Manz & Sims, 1980, 2001). Lists, notes, screensavers, and motivational posters are just a few examples of external cues that can help keep attention and effort focused on goal attainment. Thus behavior-focused self-leadership strategies are designed to encourage positive, desirable behaviors that lead to successful outcomes, while suppressing negative, undesirable behaviors that lead to unsuccessful outcomes.
(2) Natural reward strategies are intended to create situations in which a person is motivated or rewarded by inherently enjoyable aspects of the task or activity (Manz & Neck, 2004; Manz & Sims, 2001). There are two primary natural reward strategies. The first involves building more pleasant and enjoyable features into a given activity so that the task itself becomes naturally rewarding (Manz & Neck, 2004; Manz & Sims, 2001). The second strategy consists of shaping perceptions by focusing attention away from the unpleasant aspects of a task and refocusing it on the task's inherently rewarding aspects (Manz & Neck, 2004; Manz & Sims, 2001). Both strategies are likely to create feelings of competence and self-determination, two primary mechanisms of intrinsic motivation (Deci & Ryan, 1985). To summarize, natural reward strategies are designed to help create feelings of competence and self-determination, which in turn energize performance-enhancing task related behaviors.
(3) Constructive thought pattern strategies are designed to facilitate the formation of constructive thought patterns and habitual ways of thinking that can positively impact performance (Manz & Neck, 2004; Neck & Manz, 1992). Constructive thought pattern strategies include identifying and replacing dysfunctional beliefs and assumptions, and practicing mental imagery and positive self-talk. Individuals should first examine their thought patterns, confronting and replacing dysfunctional irrational beliefs and assumptions with more constructive thought processes (Burns, 1980; Ellis, 1977; Manz & Neck, 2004; Neck & Manz, 1992). Negative and destructive self-talk should be identified and replaced with more positive and enabling internal dialogues.
Self-talk is defined as what people covertly tell themselves (Neck & Manz, 1992, 1996) and involves mental self-evaluations and reactions (Ellis, 1977; Neck & Manz, 1992). By carefully analyzing self-talk patterns, negative or pessimistic self-talk can be suppressed or eliminated and replaced with more optimistic self-dialogues (Seligman, 1991). Finally, mental imagery is the symbolic and covert cognitive creation of an experience or task prior to actual overt physical muscular movement (cf. Driskell, Copper, & Moran, 1994; Finke, 1989; Neck & Manz, 1992, 1996). Individuals who envision successful performance of an activity in advance of actual performance are more likely to perform successfully when faced with the actual task (Manz & Neck, 2004). To evaluate this assertion, Driskell et al. (1994) performed a meta-analysis of 35 empirical studies and found a statistically significant positive effect for mental imagery on individual performance tasks.
Our purpose in this paper...
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