According to Manz & Neck self-leadership is a process through which individuals control their own behavior, influencing and leading themselves through the use of specific sets of behavioral and cognitive strategies. Self-leadership as a concept emerged in the mid-1980s as an expansion of self-management, which was originally rooted in clinical self-control theory. Recently self-leadership has been widely used by Academics, managers and business executives in the work places.
Self-leadership is a self-influence process through which people achieve the self-direction and self-motivation necessary to perform (Manz, 1986; Manz and Neck, 2004). Some specific behavioral and cognitive strategies are included in self-leadership which are designed to positively influence personal effectiveness and efficiencies. There are three primary categories of self-leadership:
- Behavior-focused strategies: the goal of strategies in this group is to improve an individual's self-awareness in order to assist behavioral management. There are some subcategories under this group: self-observation (first step toward changing or eliminating ineffective and unproductive behaviors), self-goal setting (setting challenging and specific goals can significantly increase individual performance levels), self-rewards, self-punishment (positively framed and introspective examination of failures and undesirable behaviors leading to the reshaping of such behaviors) and self-cueing (effective means of encouraging constructive behaviors and reducing or eliminating destructive ones). As a result behavior-focused self-leadership strategies are designed to encourage positive, desirable behaviors that lead to successful outcomes, while suppressing negative, undesirable behaviors that lea ...