It’s Not All About the Self: Exploring the Interplay Between Self-leadership and the Social Work Environment

Self-leadership has traditionally been positioned as an individual-level phenomenon, putting strong emphasis on individuals' responsibility to influence themselves in order to achieve positive outcomes.However, this perspective may oversee that individuals are embedded in a social system, and that self-leadership may be best achieved as a collective endeavor that involves the individual and their interaction with the social environment.The present research thus aims to understand how individuals and their social environment at work (i.e., managers, co-workers) play together in order to enable self-leadership.The question was addressed using an inductive coding approach to qualitative data that stem from 73 semi-structured interviews with job newcomers from one organization in Germany.The findings showed that newcomers' self-led behavior could be enabled by two key aspects of their social environment (i.e., individualized support for learning; team members acting as partners), which shaped and were shaped by newcomers' internal process of becoming aware of their task and relations-oriented contributions at work.Overall, our findings point to the role that the social environment plays for self-leadership.We discuss implications for self-leadership theory.