The Organizational Context of Individual Efficacy

Efficacy—the individual’s perceived expectancy of obtaining valued outcomes through personal effort—appears to yield a variety of important effects in school organizations. Efficacy has been identified as a social psychological antecedent to many individual-level outcomes, such as student performance and teacher effectiveness. Program implementation and evaluation studies also increasingly point to efficacy as a significant determinant of resistance to, or persistence of, organizational interventions. This paper moves from looking at research on individual efficacy as the antecedent to various school outcomes, to the dependent variable linked to characteristics of organizational structure. First, alternative views of the efficacy construct are reviewed, pertinent to varying interpretations of how the same structural feature may differentially influence alternative forms of efficacy. Second, a distinction is made between organizational and performance efficacy. Then, general images of structural determinants of individual efficacy are outlined from existing organizational theory. The paper concludes with specific propositions related to the pattern of interaction between contiguous structural levels which might guide future research and practice on efficacy in school organizations.