At Osca we’ve been thinking a lot about self-efficacy, but what does it mean and how is it useful? We’ve given a very, very brief introduction to our current thinking below.
What is self-efficacy?
The phrase was coined by Stanford Professor Albert Bandura in the 60s. He defined self-efficacy as one’s belief in one’s ability to succeed in specific situations or accomplish a task.
The self-efficacy field of research
Today, self-efficacy is the primary way of measuring the extent people believe they can create change. Self-efficacy research is still active today across fields as diverse as organisational design, exercise and parenting. Vast quantities of research have been undertaken about how to create the support – or “scaffolding” – for people to have self-efficacy for any given activity. Despite this, self-efficacy theory and practice has failed to have a significant influence on public service design thinking outside health.
The emergence of the ‘self-efficacy practices’
The vast majority of projects and methods that create self-efficacy have been developed without any knowledge of formal self-efficacy theory. They have been developed because they work in practice. There is therefore a growing collection of theories and practices being used to create the new breed of people powered services (PPS). At Osca we call these the ‘self-efficacy practices’. We group these practices under the following headings:
Locus of authority: transactional analysis, public participation
Operating context: assemblage theory, systems thinking
Self-efficacy support: scaffolding theory, motivational theory
Service quality: impact measurement, design thinking
Organisational design: network theory, distributed leadership
User control: self-efficacy, empowerment.
Examples & opportunities for self-efficacy based PPS
We have identified two primary applications of self-efficacy for the improvement of public services:
- Enable individuals to directly take more control of their lives – for example their health or job prospects.
- Create organisations that give their staff radical levels of autonomy to improve organisational effectiveness.
|User Empowerment||Delivery Staff Empowerment|
|Groundswell (UK) health for the homeless||ESBZ School Berlin (Germany) schooling|
|Spice (UK) time-credits||Office of Chief Information Officer (USA) central government|
|Club Soda (UK) addiction support||Sheffield Microsystem Academy (UK) health|
|South Yorkshire Housing Association (UK) housing||West Suffolk Social Care (UK) social care|
|Community Catalysts (UK) social care||Medium (USA), social media|
|Self Management UK (UK) Self care in health||Matt Black Systems (UK) aeronautics|
|Smart Recovery (UK) addiction support||Zappos (USA) online retailer|
|Public service challenge||Possible PPS Intervention|
|Long term unemployed||‘Coaching for jobs centres’ creating efficacy in job seekers.|
|Youth unemployment||Mentoring and network creation to school, FE and HE leavers.|
|High dependency social care||Bespoke autonomy focussed care delivered by autonomous staff.|
|Low efficacy in secondary school||Early stage coaching and mentoring provision for students.|
|Squeezed public sector workforce||Practical set of principles for any public service organisation.|
|Low dependency social service users||Goal setting and problem solving for low dependency users.|
For details about Osca’s work in this area, see our blog on why we’re focussing on self-efficacy in 2017.