Personal Values, Autonomy, and Self-efficacy: Evidence from frontline service employees

Employee's self-efficacy has been related with important outcomes for organizations, such as service quality and job performance. Thus, understanding the antecedents of self-efficacy can have important payoffs. Accordingly, this paper investigates how personal values interact with autonomy to affect employee's self-efficacy. The hypotheses are tested with a sample of bank employees. The results reveal that conservation is negatively related to self-efficacy and that both openness to change and self-enhancement values have a positive impact on self-efficacy. Autonomy is also positively associated with self-efficacy. Finally, autonomy mitigates the negative effects of conservation on self-efficacy, and strengthens the positive effects of self-enhancement on self-efficacy.