This is the second in our 25-part series examining the key areas of any good employee engagement survey. Today’s essential ingredient to workplace engagement is confidence.

Confidence is the fuel that allows a company to accelerate

A story has endured from the days when Thomas Edison was developing the first light bulb. One day Edison handed an early model of the bulb to a young boy who was assisting him. As the boy was carrying the bulb up the stairs, he dropped it and it shattered. It took Edison and his team 24 hours to develop another bulb, and when it was finished, Edison approached the same boy and handed him the bulb.

That simple gesture from one of America’s most brilliant scientific minds illuminates a crucial aspect of employee engagement in the workplace – confidence. Edison understood that the development of that apprentice’s confidence hinged on the teacher’s response to his mistake. The bulb was important, but convincing the boy that he could move forward with strength meant even more.

At the heart of employee confidence is the concept of self-efficacy, or the degree to which employees believe they can succeed at a certain task. According to Albert Bandura, the legendary psychologist who is considered the father of the study of self-efficacy, four factors lead to a person’s confidence in his own ability: mastery experiences, modeling, social persuasion and stress resilience. When a manager can help create those types of experiences in a workplace, it goes a long way toward boosting employee confidence

Sowing mastery experiences in a workplace means giving employees the tools and freedom to master necessary skills and then seek further challenges. Bandura describes it this way: “People with high assurance in their capabilities approach difficult tasks as challenges to be mastered rather than as threats to be avoided."

Modeling is a persuasive route to greater employee confidence because a person becomes more self-efficacious when they see someone else successfully implement a task. Vicarious modeling is particularly effective when the person doing the modeling is close in age and ability to the one who is watching. For example, a novice tennis player would not gain as much confidence from watching Andy Roddick as from a player who is just a step or two ahead.

Persuasion is a key component in the infusion of confidence in the workplace, whether it comes in the form of verbal encouragement or reassuring actions like the one attributed to Thomas Edison so many years ago. Managers can help build self-efficacy in their employees by convincing them that they can be successful, even at jobs that seem to be beyond their abilities.

Finally, a healthy work environment is one in which stress and anxiety are downplayed and even trials are absorbed into the larger mission of the organization. Employees who are given the latitude to seek mastery and know that they can continue that pursuit even after a failure develop the resiliency to become valuable, long-term contributors to the mission of their company.

Imagine a company populated with people characterized by self-efficacy, employees who take risks with confidence, backed up by past mastery, consistent modeling, persuasion and a resilient climate. The result of such a commitment to confidence would be excellence and unity in the pursuit of that company’s most essential goals.