Development of junior faculty's self-efficacy: outcomes of a National Center of Leadership in Academic Medicine.

Abstract

Time as UCSD faculty Mean 3.7 years 2.7 years Range 1–7 years .5–7.5 years In 2000, several articles were published discussing the importance of academic medical centers’ addressing the attitudes and obstacles junior faculty have concerning their career progress and success. All agreed that formal mentoring programs, whether gender-based or work-environment–driven, would have positive effects on junior faculty’s performance, attracting and retaining those who have chosen academic medicine as their careers. In 1998, the Office of Women’s Health within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services created four National Centers of Leadership in Academic Medicine (NCLAMs) to help faculty members of both sexes obtain mentors and thereby facilitate their career advancement. This study is the first in a series of reports of outcome data collected by the University of California, San Diego’s (UCSD’s) NCLAM in evaluating whether a formal mentoring process in an academic medical center has an impact on junior faculty’s selfefficacy, thereby leading to development of career competency. Mentoring has traditionally been viewed as a human resource strategy for enhanced leadership development, professional socialization, and competence in education and business training. Few studies have addressed the significance of formal mentoring in the development of professionals in the field of health care. Review of the literature showed that those studying the concept of mentoring have proven a strong correlation with the concept of self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is one’s personal belief or conviction in the ability to carry out a behavior that will produce a particular outcome, a sense of confidence that one can organize and complete a behavior competently. In other professional-education literature, self-efficacy has been seen as an important motivational construct. It influences both goal and goal attainment, an individual’s choice of activities and tasks, and his or her coping skills while engaged in those tasks. An effective mentorship program in academic medicine, therefore, should be able to facilitate the self-efficacy of the participant through encouragement, recognition of potential, role modeling, and promotion of opportunities. Self-efficacy is the mentoring outcome of information cognitively processed by a participant through performances needed to fit changing circumstances in his or her career.