When (and why) job self-efficacy does not promote career success: The roles of resilience and organizational prototypicality

Does job self-efficacy affect career success? In this article, we explore the idea that not only insufficient, but also excessive self-efficacy can impede success. We used multisource, time-lag data on managers working at a social-work organization to test our theoretical predictions. Our results show that job self-efficacy has a curvilinear relationship with resilient behavior, which in turn affects managers’ career success: self-efficacy increased resilience up to a point where it turned not significant. We also found an antidote for the negative consequences of low self-efficacy: when managers were perceived to embody the values and behaviors typical in their organization—i.e., high organizational prototypicality—low self-efficacy did not hamper their success. These findings suggest that low job self-efficacy is not invariably an obstacle to being successful in organizations. They also contravene the assumption that the more self-efficacy, the better; a supportive work environment might be just as important.