It’s Not All About the Self: Exploring the Interplay Between Self-leadership and the Social Work Environment

Abstract

ABSTRACT Self-leadership has traditionally been positioned as an individual-level phenomenon, putting strong emphasis on individuals’ responsibility to influence themselves in order to achieve positive outcomes. However, this perspective may oversee that individuals are embedded in a social system, and that self-leadership may be best achieved as a collective endeavour that involves the individual and their interaction with the social environment. The present research thus aims to understand how individuals and their social environment at work (i.e. managers, co-workers) play together in order to enable self-leadership. The question was addressed using an inductive coding approach to qualitative data that stem from 73 semi-structured interviews with job newcomers from one organization in Germany. The findings showed that newcomers’ self-led behaviour could be enabled by two key aspects of their social environment (i.e. individualized support for learning; team members acting as partners), which shaped and were shaped by newcomers’ internal process of becoming aware of their task and relations-oriented contributions at work. Overall, our findings point to the role that the social environment plays for self-leadership. We discuss the implications for self-leadership theory. MAD statement Self-leadership is of increasing importance in today’s complex and rapidly changing work environment. As individuals do not operate in a social vacuum, but are constantly impacted by and are impacting their social environment themselves, it is important to explore how an individual’s social environment at work (i.e. their leaders and co-workers) can encourage individual self-leadership. Based on qualitative interviews, we describe the interplay between job newcomer’s perceptions of leader and co-worker behaviour, their internal awareness processes, and self-led behaviour. Thereby, we provide specific aspects of how leaders and co-workers can encourage individual self-leadership at work.