Self‐efficacy, prosocial impact, and self‐legitimacy as psychological predictors of judicial officer performance

Abstract The current work explores three potential facilitators of judicial performance. Participants in a state‐wide survey of judicial officers (response rate = 33.9 percent) completed self‐report measures of self‐efficacy, prosocial impact, and self‐legitimacy as well as subjectively perceived performance. Objective performance data collected by the state court administrative office were then merged with the survey data. Latent variable analysis confirmed the three predictor constructs' separability, and although all four concepts were correlated, self‐efficacy was the sole independent predictor of subjective performance. An unplanned mediation analysis suggested significant indirect effects of self‐legitimacy and prosocial impact on subjectively assessed performance through self‐efficacy. Regarding objective performance, self‐efficacy emerged as the only significant correlate or predictor. The research therefore empirically demonstrates the empirical distinctiveness of self‐efficacy, prosocial impact, and self‐legitimacy and provides some exploratory support for a causal model whereby self‐efficacy provides the proximal impact on performance but is itself facilitated by prosocial impact and self‐legitimacy.