Reducing project failures with self efficacy

According to research, yes it does.

There’s nothing new in the connection of high self efficacy scores and high performance. It has been established for as long as 30 years. There are several papers available about this – all confirming that high levels of self efficacy in the project team results in better project outcomes.

Probably the most interesting research for me, was on the International Journal of Project Management (link below).

The research was based on five areas of Project Management and broken into impact on both operational and strategic performance. This seeks to reflect the complexity of most projects. It sought to establish if increased performance in these areas was linked to increasing level of self-efficacy in the project people. The results confirmed this to be true.

The research also raised the interesting question of whether a move away from the traditional way of assessing the quality project managers by their skills and competencies was sensible.

‘Academically, a common, established scale to measure project management self-efficacy would provide a tool for improving project management training and education, and increasing the comparability of research results across samples, industries and project results'.

Possibly in the future, we could simply use the level of self efficacy to profile good project managers - much simpler and already accepted as the best indicator of future performance in many areas of management for decades. Self efficacy scores are agnostic of industry experience or technical skills – they not specified by any tool, method or standard.

Our team members all scored highly - how would you score on this?

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Read the full paper here:

(Project management self-efficacy as a predictor of project performance: Constructing and validating a domain-specific scale -Tomas Blomquist, Ali Dehghanpour Farashah, Janice Thomas)

‘People who score high on perceived self-efficacy are expected to perform better that those who score low in perceived self-efficacy’. (Schwarzer, 2014).