Suchergebnisse

Archival data present opportunities to test important research questions. Unfortunately, archival data do not always include validated measures of the psychological constructs that may be of interest to researchers. In this article, the authors describe how the construct equivalence approach can be applied to organizational archival data to derive and empirically validate surrogate measures of psychological constructs. A step-by-step explanation of how to validate such measures, which includes the use of confirmatory factor analysis to examine the data from a multitrait-multimethod perspective, is described. This approach facilitates the use of organizational archives for research purposes.

This research used Bandura's social cognitive framework of self-regulation to examine functional group leadership. Antecedents and outcomes of leader goals and leadership self-efficacy (LSE) were central to this investigation. Leaders were 96 college students who led three-person teams on either a more simple or complex production task. Results indicated that LSE predicted leader goal levels, and together LSE and leader goals predicted task strategies communicated by leaders to group members. Most effects of LSE and leader goals on group outcomes were mediated by leader strategies. In addition, LSE was instrumental to the leader's maintenance of challenging goals when leaders confronted a complex task. Findings offered general support for extending Bandura's self-regulation model to group leadership task settings.