Self-Leadership: A Paradoxical Core of Organizational Behavior

By G. Stewart, Stephen H. Courtright, Charles C. Manz. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 2019

141 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This review focuses on the paradoxical concept of self-leadership—defined as a comprehensive self-influence process capturing how individuals motivate themselves to complete work that is naturally motivating or work that must be done but is not naturally motivating—as a fundamental process that challenges many traditional assumptions in organizational psychology and organizational behavior. We first present a historical review that traces the roots of self-leadership to early psychological theory and research. We next briefly summarize research related to self-leadership at both the individual and team levels of analysis. We then discuss four paradoxes associated with self-leadership: the paradox of self-leadership depletion and strengthening, the paradox of self-leadership through collaboration, the paradox of me-but-not-you self-leadership, and the paradox of needing self-leadership to improve self-leadership. We conclude with guidelines for future research and practice.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b6b70ded17dd84c66df47138f8acb7582eed620a