Academic procrastination in college students: The role of self-leadership

Abstract

Procrastination has been recognized as the quintessence of self-regulatory failure. Self-leadership strategies operate within the broader theoretical context of self-regulation and represent a complementary set of strategies designed to improve the self-regulation process. This study is the first to investigate the association between self-leadership with academic procrastination in a sample of 533 Chinese college students. We included the three primary self-leadership strategies in multiple regression models as well as various demographic variables, self-efficacy, trait anxiety, neuroticism, and conscientiousness. All the three primary self-leadership strategies of behavior-focused strategies, natural reward strategies, and constructive thought pattern strategies significantly predicted the students' academic procrastination, in addition to increased neuroticism and lower conscientiousness. Further, the multivariate regression showed that the self-leadership sub-strategies of self-reward, self-goal setting, self-talk, task-based natural rewards, and task-relation-based observation significantly predicted the students' academic procrastination. The findings of this study suggest that practicing relative self-leadership strategies may reduce students' procrastination.