What's self-efficacy worth?

 

Another key component of the expectancy-value theory is the concept of self-efficacy. Self-efficacy, or perceived control, has to do with a person’s sense of agency and their ability to control the outcomes of their actions. It’s a general capacity to understand your personal skills and coping mechanisms and to use that as a basis of understanding for success. In order to gauge your self-efficacy people use four different sources. First, there’s your personal history. The effect your actions had on the outcome in the past will affect your self-efficacy in current instances. Two, there’s the experience of others. Watching another person’s performance, especially if they do well, encourages your own self-efficacy. Three, there’s verbal praise or persuasion. Encouragement from peers, from a teacher, from a parent, from a coach, can give someone encouragement in their sense of self-efficacy where it might have been lagging. Four, there’s your physiological state. On a day where you wake up feeling refreshed and confident, you might be more likely to take risks you wouldn’t on a day where you slept horribly and you’re feeling anxious. These four sources all contribute to your perceived control of your skills, your situation, and the sureness of the outcome. It affects how hard you try, the decisions you make, how you feel about something, and what activities you enjoy.

Peggy Olson, seemingly, has an incredibly high sense of self-efficacy. For all intents and purposes, there’s no reason for her high self-efficacy. Even though she starts the series off as a mousy, self-righteous secretary, she seems to have more sense of autonomy and perceived control than the other women in the office, despite the fact that Peggy completely disagrees with the way people conduct themselves. At first, her main sources of self-efficacy come from verbal persuasion and vicarious viewing. When Peggy is discovered, it’s by a head copywriter named Freddie, who appears throughout the show and acts as a father-figure to Peggy. Without Freddie’s verbal persuasion, and literally his verbal recommendation of her idea, Peggy never would have been considered for the position of junior copywriter. Then in her early days as a junior copywriter, the source of her self-efficacy comes from viewing and imitating the successes of the men around her. Later, Peggy’s sense of self-efficacy grows as she gains more success and has that success as a backbone. Increasingly, Peggy’s self-worth and self-esteem come from her success in work, and that is ultimately where she gets the highest sense of self-efficacy even while other parts of her life are diminished. When her relationships are lacking, when her mother does not understand her, Peggy’s sense of self-efficacy remains unchanged because her perceived control in her work is unmatched.