Adaptive self-regulation: A process view of managerial effectiveness

Abstract

This article describes a set of processes involved in attaining managerial effectiveness. These processes are components of an adaptive self-regulation framework. They involve the active management of constituencies' role expectations and performance opinions through standard-setting, discrepancy-detection, and discrepancy-reduction. These processes serve to enhance constitutents' opinions of the manager's effectiveness. Several social and contextual factors that either facilitate or inhibit managers' self-regulation efforts are identified and hypotheses to guide future empirical research are offered.