638742

research-article2016
TCPXXX10.1177/0011000016638742The Counseling PsychologistLent

Leona Tyler Award Address

The Counseling Psychologist
2016, Vol. 44(4) 573­–594
Self-Efficacy in a © The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0011000016638742
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of Adaptation and
Development

Robert W. Lent1

Abstract
Albert Bandura’s social cognitive theory offers a remarkably flexible
framework for understanding many issues of practical concern to counseling
and vocational psychology. In this article, the author provides an overview
of several efforts to extend social cognitive theory to the contexts of career
and personal development. These have included the development of a set
of social cognitive career theory (SCCT) models aimed at understanding
various aspects of career and academic development. In another offshoot
and extension of social cognitive theory, the author and his colleagues
have explored how self-efficacy, in particular, develops and is revised in an
interpersonal context. Though the latter work has thus far received less
empirical attention in counseling psychology than SCCT, the “relational
efficacy model” may have the potential to aid understanding of the growth-
promoting functions of relationships that are of particular interest to the field,
such as those involving client–therapist and supervisee–supervisor dyads.

Keywords
prevention/well-being, psychotherapy, vocational psychology

1Department of Counseling, Higher Education, and Special Education, University of Maryland,

College Park, MD, USA

Corresponding Author:
Robert W. Lent, Department of Counseling, Higher Education, and Special Education,
University of Maryland, 3214 Benjamin, College Park, MD 20742, USA.
Email: boblent@umd.edu
574 The Counseling Psychologist 44(4)

It is a wonderful honor to receive the Leona Tyler award, and I am very grate-
ful for the opportunity to provide this written version of my 2015 Tyler
address. First, I would like to acknowledge the namesake of this award for
her unique and enduring legacy within our field.

A Bow to Leona Elizabeth Tyler

As a counseling-vocational psychologist, I am fascinated by careers, and
Leona Tyler had a truly inspiring career. One of the founding parents of coun-
seling psychology, she served as our division president in 1960 and, in 1972,
served as president of the APA. In addition to The Work of the Counselor, first
published in 1953—and one of her signature contributions to our field—she
published on a wide range of topics, such as interests, creativity, intelligence,
and human differences. By my reading, Professor Tyler had a very lively
mind and a broad set of intellectual interests. On a personal level, her col-
leagues at the University of Oregon described her as “disciplined . . . ,warm,
generous, and idealistic” (Sundberg & Littman, 1994).
I am pleased to say that I actually got to meet Leona Tyler. Although it was
only a brief encounter, and although I confess to having been a bit starstruck, I
got to experience the warmth and generosity that Sundberg and Littman had
described. She was traveling through Minnesota one spring when I was a young
staff psychologist at the university’s counseling center, then called the Student
Counseling Bureau. I am pretty sure I was introduced to her by Ellen Betz—
Nancy Betz’s mother—who was a colleague and early mentor of mine at the
bureau.
Speaking of Nancy Betz, here is a picture of Leona Tyler speaking at a
Division 17 event in 1986; that is Nancy in the lower right-hand corner of the
photo (see Figure 1). Nancy herself went on to receive the Tyler award some
years ago. There is something so right about the image of Leona Tyler pass-
ing the torch on to the next generation of outstanding leaders in counseling
psychology. I wish I had gotten to spend more time with Professor Tyler. She
helped define the contours of our field and establish a tradition that counsel-
ing psychologists can study any psychological topic, while contributing a
distinctive focus on positive functioning. And she was a wonderful example
of the synergy between science and practice. She was both a thought leader
and an organizational leader.

(More Than) a Little Help From My Friends

The subtext of my address is, to paraphrase the Beatles, that we get by with a
little help from our friends. Actually, we get by—and thrive—with loads of
help from, and interaction with, our friends. I am extremely fortunate to count
Lent 575

Figure 1. Leona Tyler Speaking at the 1986 APA Conference

Source. Photo courtesy of Dianne and Fred Borgen.

Steve Brown and Gail Hackett among my friends. In a very real sense, I share
the Tyler Award with my friends, collaborators, students, and the fellow
researchers of social cognitive career theory (SCCT). I especially share this
award with Steve and Gail.
Fred Borgen once described SCCT as a corporate theory—corporate in the
sense that many people have contributed to its development over the years. I
have always appreciated that description and felt it was accurate. But the old
hippie spirit in me grimaces a little at the corporate metaphor and would
prefer instead to describe it as a “communal” enterprise. If you have read
Walter Isaacson’s recent book titled The Innovators, you know that social
collaboration is a much more common well-spring for ideas and inventions
than is the “lone wolf” stereotype. Steve, Gail, and I were fortunate to become
familiar with Albert Bandura’s (1986) mother-lode theory early on, which
provided a golden opportunity to tie vocational phenomena to a much larger
literature on human behavior and motivation. We were also fortunate to have
a considerable number of researchers and practitioners, including many of
our own students, contribute to the theory’s evolution by extending it to many
novel issues and diverse populations. SCCT would amount to little if thought-
ful and creative colleagues were not willing to apply it to interesting ques-
tions, test its assumptions, and identify its strengths and limitations. As Lyle
Schmidt, one of my professors at Ohio State, was fond of saying, “many
hands make light work.”
576 The Counseling Psychologist 44(4)

About SCCT
One of the things I am most pleased about is that many of the theory’s appli-
cations had social justice implications. To cite just a few examples, SCCT has
been used to study factors that affect the involvement of women and students
of color in STEM fields; the career development of groups as diverse as
LGBT workers, low-income students, domestic abuse survivors, and persons
with disabilities; and the job search experiences of unemployed persons. The
theory starts with some fairly simple notions—for example, that we tend to
become interested in activities we believe we are good at and at which we
expect to receive positive outcomes. Like Holland’s “birds of a feather”
hypothesis, the theory assumes that, under optimal conditions, people prefer
to choose occupational paths that match their interests.
But SCCT is also concerned with such issues as how interests develop and
change over time—and about how people make occupational decisions when
they are not simply free to follow their interests, or when their choices are
constrained by the wishes of others, financial need, limited job qualifications,
or other realities. SCCT was not intended to replace theories like Holland’s or
Super’s so much as it was to complement them by addressing some of their
gaps, such as how career development unfolds under less than ideal condi-
tions or how environmental supports, barriers, and learning experiences,
including gender role socialization, tend to open or close certain occupational
doors for certain persons. It was also intended to help bridge or unify earlier
career development theories, using the framework of social cognitive theory.
Scholars who focused on SCCT profited from, and tried to build on, the pio-
neering efforts of the foundational career theorists, yet they drew especially on
Hackett and Betz’s (1981) acute, early insights about how career self-efficacy
beliefs, acquired in a social context, help to shape career possibilities. Although
Hackett and Betz had focused on women’s career development, their ideas clearly
had both universal relevance and particular resonance for marginalized or
oppressed groups in the workplace. I am amazed that SCCT has now had its 21st
birthday, and that its roots in career self-efficacy theory go back about 35 years.

A Brief Primer on Self-Efficacy

I would like to focus first on self-efficacy—and especially the social context
in which it is forged and revised over time. Although self-efficacy has gone
from being a new kid on the vocational block to a popular topic of research,
I think we are still learning about how it works, when it works (and does not
work), where it comes from, and how to promote it. I think we still have not
tapped its full potential in career counseling, psychotherapy, and supervision,
as well as in our personal life roles and relationships.
Lent 577

I will start out with a brief overview of self-efficacy and SCCT, and then
highlight the social context of efficacy belief development, with special
emphasis on our roles as efficacy-builders for others in both therapeutic and
educational settings. In keeping with Bandura’s (1997) definition, self-
efficacy refers to our beliefs about our abilities to perform specific behaviors
or courses of action. It addresses the fundamental question, “Can I do this?”
These beliefs are specific to particular activity domains, tasks, and situations.
And, according to social cognitive theory, they help determine which life
roles and activities we will gravitate toward or away from, how much effort
we will devote to them (especially when we encounter rough spots), how we
feel while doing them, and how well and how long we will do them.
Despite the occasional confusion, self-efficacy is not the same thing as
general self-confidence, self-esteem, or objective ability. However, it does
have implications for our self-esteem, and it can be thought of as situation- or
task-specific confidence. While it is not the same thing as objective ability,
self-efficacy beliefs are partly based on the ability we have demonstrated
through our past performances. Most important, self-efficacy helps deter-
mine what we can achieve with our objective abilities. In that sense, it is an
ability catalyst. Two people with the same measured ability may produce
performances of vastly different quality, depending on their self-efficacy
beliefs. Albert Einstein would still have been one heck of a smart person,
even with low physics self-efficacy. But would he have been able to marshal
the incredible effort and perseverance it took to develop his theories, in the
face of monumental challenges, if he had harbored serious doubts about his
capabilities?
In the context of SCCT, self-efficacy can help to explain and promote a
variety of academic and career development outcomes, in particular interest
development, choice making and choice stability, performance attainments,
domain-specific satisfaction and well-being, and self-management of a vari-
ety of adaptive career behaviors. As with all theoretical constructs, there are
also limits to what self-efficacy can do or explain. For example, self-efficacy
cannot compensate or substitute for clearly inadequate or undeveloped abili-
ties. Hollywood’s well-worn sports cliché notwithstanding, if I could some-
how convince myself that I could hit major league pitching, that belief alone
will not help me hit a home run in Yankee Stadium. And such overconfidence
is not likely to last long in the wake of strikeout after strikeout.

From Self-Efficacy to SCCT: A Little Help From Self-Efficacy’s

Friends
Another important point is that self-efficacy is not a one-factor theory. Rather,
it is part of a network of cognitive, behavioral, trait, contextual, and “person
578 The Counseling Psychologist 44(4)

input” (e.g., gender) variables. Some of the core elements in SCCT include
outcome expectations, or beliefs about the consequences of given actions;
goals, referring to the determination to engage in a particular activity; and
contextual factors, including the environmental supports and barriers that
accompany the pursuit of a particular goal. If these elements were characters
in a play, here are the roles they might play: self-efficacy might be the confi-
dent one; outcome expectations, the hopeful one; goals, the ambitious one;
and supports, the kind, nurturing one.
Barriers might be the villain, but bear in mind that obstacles and chal-
lenges do advance the plot, often by providing the protagonist with adversity
that can help to test and forge personal capabilities. In The Wizard of Oz,
Dorothy may not have needed the Wicked Witch, in any direct sense, to get
back to Kansas. But when she did return to Auntie Em, she probably did so
with a healthier sense of her ability to cope with flying monkeys, cowardly
lions, and myriad other obstacles. No doubt, the support provided by her
motley crew (and, paradoxically, by a “wizard” with feet of clay), also helped
her confidence soar, both literally and figuratively. Of course, not all stories
have happy endings and people’s travails can stem from many sources,
including systemic ones that can be quite insensitive to an individual’s levels
of self-efficacy, hope, or support.
So, why the need for SCCT? As I noted earlier, Gail Hackett, Steve Brown,
and I were, in part, trying to integrate some of the key insights of prior career
theories. We were also trying to fill in some of their gaps, such as the ques-
tions of where interests come from and how people make school and work-
related choices when circumstances prevent them from simply following
their interests. We also wanted to wrestle with challenging questions about
how gender, race, culture, disability, and other individual difference factors
fit into the career puzzle. How do things like occupational segregation come
about? Why are some groups more likely to wind up in, or to be excluded
from, certain career locations than others? Why, for example, are men so
much more likely to go into engineering than are women? And why is the
opposite true in occupations like teaching or nursing? We also wanted to
grapple with things like how the environment operates either to enable or
limit personal agency in career choice and development.

The SCCT Family of Models

Those sorts of questions led us to develop, over time, five intertwined theo-
retical models in which SCCT’s basic cast of characters serve as a sort of
repertory company. They reprise their roles—sometimes with a costume
change or two—in playing out different career development scenarios. We
Lent 579

presented the three original models, focusing on academic and career inter-
est, choice, and performance, in 1994, extending our discussion of contextual
supports and barriers a few years later (Lent, Brown, & Hackett, 1994, 2000);
we then added a model of academic and work satisfaction (Lent & Brown,
2006, 2008) and a process model of career self-management (Lent & Brown,
2013). Unfortunately, Steve and I needed to proceed without Gail’s involve-
ment on the latter models, given the increased demands of her flourishing
career in academic leadership.
Figure 2 shows the big picture model that we presented in our 1994 article.
Given the purposes of this article, it is not necessary to get into the specific
pathways here. However, I will mention that the original models (or subsets
of them) have been studied quite a bit. In fact, enough research has emerged
to support a series of meta-analyses testing the interest, choice, and perfor-
mance hypotheses (e.g., Brown, Lent, Telander, & Tramayne, 2011; Brown
et al., 2008; Sheu et al., 2010). Most of the meta-analyses on SCCT have
aggregated findings over individual difference dimensions because of the
limited number of studies done with particular groups. Fortunately, the litera-
ture has now progressed to the point where we can begin, in some cases, to
summarize larger sets of findings both within and across certain grouping
variables.
For example, Hung-Bin Sheu, Matt Miller, and I, along with our students,
have obtained data from more than 200 studies, allowing us to test SCCT’s
interest and choice models meta-analytically within STEM fields. The find-
ings should provide a window on the generalizability of the models across
gender and racial and ethnic groups in career fields that have a long history
of uneven access. Other teams of researchers are doing very important work,
at the level of original studies, testing the theory’s relevance for a number of
underrepresented groups in STEM fields, including women, students of
color, and first-generation college students (e.g., Byars-Winston, Estrada,
Howard, Davis, & Zalapa, 2010; Garriott, Flores, & Martens, 2013; Navarro,
Flores, Lee, & Gonzalez, 2014).
Based primarily on meta-analytic findings, the three original models tend
to hold up fairly well overall. For example, self-efficacy appears to be a good
predictor of academic and work performance, partly mediating the relation-
ship of ability or past performance to subsequent performance outcomes
(Brown et al., 2011; Brown et al., 2008). But there have also been some sur-
prises. Contrary to our original hypotheses, for instance, environmental sup-
ports and barriers may play a more prominent role as antecedents of
self-efficacy and outcome expectations rather than as direct promoters or
deterrents of career goals. The meta-analytic findings also suggest that much
of self-efficacy’s predictive contribution to career goals may be funneled
580 The Counseling Psychologist 44(4)

Figure 2. Model of Person, Contextual, and Experiential Factors Affecting Career-

Related Choice Behavior
Note. Direct relations between variables are indicated with solid lines; moderator effects are
shown with dashed lines.
Source. Copyright 1993 by R. W. Lent, S. D. Brown, and G. Hackett. Reprinted by permission.

through outcome expectations and interests. That is, stronger self-efficacy

beliefs are associated with stronger outcome expectations and interests,
which, in turn, predict choices. This is a fairly consistent finding across
Holland theme activity domains (Sheu et al., 2010).
One key limitation is that the meta-analyses are based largely on cross-
sectional findings. More longitudinal and experimental studies are needed to
better test SCCT’s posited temporal flow and causal pathways. Existing lon-
gitudinal and experimental studies, although less numerous, often do show
promising findings (Sheu & Lent, 2015). For example, in one recent study we
found that students’ persistence in STEM majors over six academic semesters
was well predicted by their self-efficacy, goals, and domain satisfaction;
these findings held across gender, racial, and ethnic groups (Lent et al., in
press). Other longitudinal findings also suggest a reliable temporal link from
self-efficacy to outcome expectations, interests, and choices (e.g., Lent, Sheu,
Gloster, & Wilkins, 2010; Lent et al., 2008).
In addition to the current five SCCT models, Bandura’s (1986, 1997)
social cognitive theory has also inspired a few theoretical cousins. For exam-
ple, I became interested some years ago in using social cognitive theory as a
unifying perspective for understanding well-being and psychosocial adjust-
ment—under both normative and disruptive life conditions. It was a chance
to revisit Super’s (1955) early emphasis on hygiology in counseling psychol-
ogy in light of contemporary approaches to subjective and psychological
Lent 581

well-being. (Super had encouraged a focus on peoples’ tendency to function

adaptively even in the face of adverse conditions, offering a counter-weight
to clinical psychology’s focus on psychopathology.) This interest led to a
general model of well-being (Lent, 2004) and more specific applications to
academic and career development (Lent & Brown, 2006, 2008). These mod-
els are attracting a fair amount of research, much of it focused on U.S. minor-
ity and international samples (e.g., Ezeofor & Lent, 2014; Lent, Taveira, &
Lobo, 2012; Sheu, Chong, Chen, & Lin, 2014).
Another theoretical cousin of SCCT is a model of relational efficacy (Lent
& Lopez, 2002). I would like to highlight this model here for several reasons.
In particular, I think it is relevant to counseling psychology’s goal of promoting
human growth and development; it relates to this article’s central theme of
viewing self-efficacy within a social context; and I would like to encourage
more empirical activity linking the model to counseling psychology phenom-
ena. But before moving on to the relational efficacy model, let me sum up a few
points: Self-efficacy appears to be a valuable, although certainly not a suffi-
cient, theoretical mechanism in career development. It complements but does
not substitute for measured ability. To reinvoke the play metaphor, it is not
necessarily the lead performer and you will not find it doing many one-person
shows, although it often gets favorable reviews as a supporting cast member.
OK, you get the idea: Self-efficacy cannot leap tall buildings in a single
bound. And unlike Superman, it does not work alone. However, it does appear
to be a good thing to have, and certainly merits our attention from an inter-
vention perspective. This leads to a variety of important questions such as,
how can we build self-efficacy, in ourselves and others, when it is low, and
how can we repair it when it stalls? This will be the focus of the last part of
my presentation.

Where Does Self-Efficacy Come From? Differing

Perspectives on Efficacy Building
There are a variety of perspectives on self-efficacy’s origins, but I will focus
on only two of them for the present purposes. The first, and best known per-
spective, is Bandura’s (1986, 1997) “four sources of self-efficacy.” In this
view, self-efficacy in a particular performance domain results from (a) prior
mastery and failure experiences, (b) vicarious learning, or exposure to mod-
els, (c) social persuasion, and (d) physiological and affective states and
reactions.
What is not always appreciated, I think, is how much the social context
matters when people are exposed to these four information sources. For
582 The Counseling Psychologist 44(4)

instance, social persuasion helps people interpret their personal successes and
failures, and, depending on what is communicated and how it is processed,
determine whether they “hang in there” or “hang it up.” Vicarious learning
can open doors to behavioral options by, for example, showing us that people
who look like us can perform and even excel at certain activities. Mastery
experiences are also important. In fact, they are typically assumed to be the
most impactful efficacy source but they, too, often occur in social situations
and require interpretation. Likewise, affect and physiological states, such as
anxiety or poise, are often interpreted in relation to social cues.
Interestingly, in an ongoing meta-analysis, we are finding that social per-
suasion may be a particularly valuable source of STEM field self-efficacy in
both female and male students (Lent et al., 2015). In fact, its contribution to
predictive equations sometimes compares favorably with that of mastery
experiences, which is not something one would expect from general self-
efficacy theory. The reason may be that social persuasion operates in unison
with, and perhaps amplifies, mastery experiences. That is, our self-efficacy
beliefs do not just register things like our SAT scores in the same way that a
weather vane mechanically reflects wind direction. Instead, we make sense
of our successes and failures through social discourse. Such discourse may
affect the lessons, if any, that we take away about our capabilities, perhaps
particularly in situations that lack definitive markers for success (e.g., social-
izing) or where attributions for success or failure (e.g., task ease vs. personal
ability) are open to interpretation.

A Tripartite Model of Efficacy Belief Development

in Close Relationships
I think Bandura’s four efficacy sources explain a great deal and have great
intervention potential in career and personal counseling. Yet Fred Lopez and
I also became intrigued a while back by a somewhat different perspective. We
called it a “tripartite view of relational efficacy beliefs” (Lent & Lopez, 2002)
and, as with SCCT, this model was designed to build on general social cogni-
tive theory.
Fred and I observed that, in discussing efficacy belief acquisition, Bandura
had focused largely on the context of individual performance—for example,
where a lone individual is performing a skill, like approaching a feared object
or learning how to drive. Although the skill may be learned in a social con-
text, its performance depends solely on the individual. The driver and the
instructor do not take the driver’s test together. Only the driver does, so it is
his or her self-efficacy that matters most in the target performance situation.
Lent 583

Another class of behavior, by contrast, is inherently interpersonal in

nature, in that its performance requires the coordination or collaboration of
two or more persons. For example, counseling is not something done exclu-
sively by the counselor. The client and counselor work together, even if the
process is structured largely by the counselor. Their beliefs, behaviors, and
affective cues are in mutual contact, if not always in harmony. As the old
song goes, “It takes two to tango.” And just as with the tango, the dance is not
always executed smoothly.
Fred and I developed the tripartite model primarily to help explain self-
efficacy building in the context of close dyadic or small group relationships,
where “self-efficacy exists within a network of complementary and continu-
ously interacting beliefs” (Lent & Lopez, 2002, p. 261). The theory was
intended to reside somewhere between self-efficacy and Bandura’s (1997)
concept of collective efficacy. Although we aimed mainly at coordinated
social behavior, we also wanted to deal with special instances of self-efficacy
belief acquisition for individual capabilities in hopes of more fully under-
standing how social persuasion and social support aid individuals’ personal
growth as well as coping efforts during periods of crisis or transition.

Elements of the Tripartite Model

The three elements in the tripartite model are self-efficacy, other-efficacy, and
relationship-inferred self-efficacy (or RISE). I know, the latter is a mouthful.
For simplicity, I will use the terms reflected efficacy and RISE interchange-
ably. The observer’s perspective is a key consideration in the tripartite model.
To take my own perspective within a dyadic relationship, self-efficacy refers
to my beliefs about what I can do (just as it does in general social cognitive
theory). Other-efficacy refers to my beliefs about what my relationship part-
ner can do. And reflected efficacy, or RISE, refers to my beliefs about what
my relationship partner thinks I can do—that is, my subjective (and poten-
tially distorted) assumptions about how he or she sees my capabilities. The
interplay among these three beliefs, and their operation in parallel with
Bandura’s (1986) four sources of efficacy information, is shown in Figure 3.
Note that we see Bandura’s efficacy sources as functioning across social rela-
tionships, whereas the relational efficacy beliefs assume a particular, typi-
cally close (or influential) relationship context. In other words, other-efficacy
and RISE beliefs represent intrarelationship sources of self-efficacy.
Now to ratchet up the complexity just a bit, both partners hold views about
the other’s efficacy and about how the other views the self. So, if you and I
were in a close relationship, I would have beliefs about your efficacy, and you
584 The Counseling Psychologist 44(4)

Figure 3. Relationship-Specific and Cross-Relationship Sources of Self-Efficacy

Information Within a Relationship Dyad
Note. Though this illustration uses the perspective of Person A, Person B is subject to
complementary belief processes.
Source. From “Cognitive Ties That Bind: A Tripartite View of Efficacy Beliefs in Growth-
promoting Relationships” by R. W. Lent and F. G. Lopez, 2002, Journal of Social and Clinical
Psychology, 21, pp. 256-286. Copyright 2002 by Guilford Press. Adapted and reprinted with
permission.

would have beliefs about mine. I have beliefs about how you see my capabili-
ties, and you have beliefs about how I see your capabilities. These comple-
mentary beliefs about self and other may not reach our level of awareness
much of the time. But the tendency to appraise one another’s capabilities may
have great instrumental value, perhaps affecting decisions about who we seek
out for close relationships, how satisfied we are with these relationships, how
open we are to another’s performance feedback, from whom we seek particu-
lar forms of assistance, and to whom we offer our own assistance. Such beliefs
can have important implications in the context of mutual pursuits and in efforts
to promote the self-efficacy of one individual or the other in a dyad, such as
when counselors attempt to restore a client’s deflated sense of efficacy regard-
ing his or her coping or problem-solving capabilities, a process akin to Jerome
Frank’s notion of “remoralization” (cf. Wampold & Budge, 2012).
Why does other-efficacy matter? One reason is that our beliefs about the
other’s efficacy help determine how seriously we will take them as builders
of our self-efficacy. That is, it gets at their credibility as skill judges. A base-
ball player is more likely to attend to feedback from someone who has played
Lent 585

the game well. Another reason why other-efficacy matters is that it can affect
our desire to maintain a relationship in instances where we depend on the
other person to achieve outcomes that are important to us. This has implica-
tions for things like persistence in counseling, the maintenance of romantic
relationships, or the performance of sports dyads and teams. In such situa-
tions, what we think of one another’s capabilities can matter quite a bit.
Why does reflected efficacy matter? There is no shortage of good exam-
ples. It is common, for instance, to hear valedictorians and other award win-
ners express gratitude to particular significant others for “believing in me.”
These beliefs are not reserved only for milestone or positive events. Reflected
efficacy beliefs may become especially salient when people have had perfor-
mance setbacks or have had cause to doubt their capabilities. On those occa-
sions, they can be particularly reliant on the views of credible others to help
restore or bolster their sense of efficacy. Reflected efficacy may also be impor-
tant as we learn complicated new skills, particularly ones that require social
coordination or whose outcomes can be open to interpretation. Teaching and
counseling are examples that come to mind. In these efficacy-building rela-
tionships, the more experienced other is viewed as a skill expert and we, there-
fore, tend to pay attention to their cues about how well we are performing.
Why do we use the term “reflected efficacy”? Basically, it is to acknowl-
edge Cooley’s (1902) early conception of the “looking-glass self” and, spe-
cifically, his notion of reflected appraisals. Cooley argued that we come to
see ourselves as important others see us—that is, we see ourselves as we are
reflected in their eyes. However, research has shown that this process is not
so simple or direct and that the relationship between self-beliefs and reflected
appraisals can be bidirectional (Lent & Lopez, 2002). For the circuit from
other-efficacy to reflected efficacy to self-efficacy to be completed, a number
of conditions need to be met. Among other things, the process involves atten-
tion, interpretation, confidence in the perceptions of the other, and access to
additional sources of efficacy information.

A Few Real-Life Examples

To bring home the commonplace nature of the relational efficacy process, let
me provide a few brief examples, culled, respectively, from a television docu-
mentary, a newspaper article, and a magazine essay, all of which I came across
around the time when I was preparing my Tyler address. First, commenting on
the pressures of song-writing, Rhiannon Giddens (2014), a gifted young musi-
cian, said, “It’s amazing what the difference having someone believe in you
will do.” She was referring to the experience of collaborating with other song-
writers, some more experienced than she, and how much their reactions
586 The Counseling Psychologist 44(4)

mattered to her confidence. Quotes like this one are easy to find because I
think they express the “ordinary magic” of social support in daily life that we
so often take for granted. I found a second good example in the sports pages:

Ian Desmond [of the Washington Nationals] is struggling right now. He sees his
batting average on the scoreboard before each at-bat, plummeting toward .200.
. . . Again and again, he repeats the same sentiment: He has been in slumps
before and climbed out of them, and knows he can do it again [italics added to
emphasize self-efficacy]. But this slump has been . . . a season-long one.
Doubts are sticky, and [they’re] tougher to dislodge the longer they are given to
establish their grip. Reassurance never hurts. Desmond found some from an
unexpected source, Orioles legend Cal Ripken Jr., who . . . pulled Desmond
aside [the other day]. “He said, ‘Hey, back in ’93, through the first 80 games I
was hitting .199. I finished with a pretty good year, [so] you’re gonna be all
right’ [italics added to emphasize other-efficacy],” Desmond recalled. “That
kind of gave me a little bit of hope. Kind of like oh, all right. If he did it, grinded
through it, I can, too” [italics added to emphasize modeling, a nice
accompaniment to other-efficacy in this case; the quote implies reflected
efficacy as well because Desmond seemed ready to accept Ripken’s appraisal
of his capabilities]. (Janes, 2015)

The last of the three examples may be the most memorable, partly in its
simple yet profound telling. It was taken from a piece in the New Yorker, writ-
ten by Roger Angell (2014), a marvelously articulate 94-year-old essayist,
describing the trials and tribulations of (and occasional humor in) the aging
process. In an especially poignant passage, Angell wrote of having endured,
within a relatively short space of time, a series of heart-rending losses, includ-
ing the deaths of his daughter and wife. Feeling that he had “lost almost every-
thing,” Angell said to his longtime therapist, “I don’t know how I’m going to
get through this.” After a silence, his therapist replied, “Neither do I. But you
will.” Angell described this spare, unadorned message as “breathtaking.”
Given the relationship context, this was no superficial effort to “cheer-
lead” or discount the depth of Angell’s despair. Angell’s decision to share this
story suggests that the therapist’s genuine, unaffected other-efficacy message
had a powerful effect, helping to rekindle hope in his coping abilities. In
terms of reflected efficacy, Angell may have inferred something like, “my
therapist thinks I can handle this tragedy, so maybe I can somehow find the
resources to cope, though I am not quite sure how at the moment.” These
inferences, which are, of course, my own, suggest the cognitive pathway
through which the relational efficacy mechanisms may function to restore
self-efficacy and aid adaptation.
Lent 587

Reflected Efficacy and Social Persuasion

One might ask, how is reflected efficacy distinct from Bandura’s concept of
social persuasion? Fred Lopez and I see them as two sides of a coin, with
social persuasion reflecting the transmission of efficacy relevant messages by
one individual to another (e.g., messages that imply “you can do it”), whereas
reflected efficacy involves how these messages are apprehended by the
receiver (e.g., are they heard accurately, amplified, distorted, missed, or
ignored?). In other words, reflected efficacy has less to do with what the other
actually says or signals about our capabilities (i.e., actual efforts to persuade)
and more to do with how we interpret her or his beliefs about us, assuming
we attend to the message. That is, reflected efficacy involves an inferential
process. Overtly, I may express support and tell you, in one way or another,
that I believe “you can do it.” But you might interpret that as a naïve, if well-
meaning, attempt to make you feel better. You may sense that, despite my
words, I do not really have much faith in your abilities or that I do not really
know you (or the skill context) well enough to make such a claim.
Alternatively, a coach can offer harsh criticism, but you might see that as an
effort to get you to work harder because he or she knows that you have the
skills to do better.
Therefore, boosts to self-efficacy can come from challenges. And overtly
supportive statements are not necessarily persuasive. From a relational effi-
cacy perspective, what a person takes away from a communication about his
or her efficacy can depend a good deal on how that individual decodes the
message and perceives the intent and credibility of the person issuing it. The
value in the message sent by Roger Angell’s therapist was less in its effort at
social persuasion and more, I believe, in Angell’s seeing it as a genuine
expression of his capabilities (reflected efficacy) by a caring other who
knows him and the coping challenge well enough to offer a hopeful progno-
sis. Angell’s faith in his therapist’s capabilities (i.e., other-efficacy) likely
increased his ability to recall the message and to incorporate it into his own
sense of coping efficacy.
It was also significant that Angell distinguished his therapist’s message
from the social support he was receiving from his friends and family mem-
bers, who took him to dinner, joined him for Yankees games, listened patiently
to his problems and, in a multitude of other ways, conveyed, in the words of
one of his friends, “you have us.” Social connectedness and other-efficacy
messages can be a powerful combination, but they are not necessarily
interchangeable.
588 The Counseling Psychologist 44(4)

Relevance for Counseling

Fred Lopez and I believe that the relational efficacy model has useful impli-
cations for many relationships that are relevant to counseling psychology, in
particular client–counselor, supervisor–supervisee, mentor–mentee, parent–
child, teacher–student, and romantic dyads. To expand on the model’s rele-
vance for counseling: Clients typically seek counseling when they are feeling
demoralized. Something may have gone wrong in their lives, something they
may feel they cannot control. Their sense of efficacy in an important life
domain has likely been disrupted. In terms of the tripartite model, counselors
aid clients, in part, by conveying a credible belief in the client’s efficacy at
coping with or resolving the issues that led to counseling or at developing
capabilities that can help to manage or prevent similar problems in the future.
Such other-efficacy messages may be particularly valuable at the outset of
therapy and at other points when clients experience setbacks or diminished
self-efficacy.
To make a difference, it is necessary for the client to perceive the thera-
pist’s belief in his or her efficacy and to accept its plausibility (this is the
“reflected efficacy” part). The recovery or growth process is accelerated
when the client has extra-therapy experiences that further test, demonstrate,
and develop his or her capabilities. If all goes well, the client will raise his or
her self-efficacy beliefs in the direction of the counselor’s other-efficacy
beliefs, and the client will continue to receive positive, efficacy-consistent
feedback outside of counseling. But this process is rarely effortless or linear,
and it may well be necessary to include a focus on things like the client’s
performance standards and change attributions, the incremental nature of the
change process, the value of attending to progress rather than ultimate goal
attainment, and preparation for setbacks. Many compelling successes may be
necessary to neutralize a persistent sense of inefficacy in an important area of
functioning.
A few caveats: First, “remoralization” or self-efficacy promotion is viewed
as a fundamental, but certainly not the only, way in which therapy aids cli-
ents. Second, this analysis does not imply that false or insincere other-effi-
cacy messages should be offered. Rather, consistent with the tenets of
counseling psychology, it encourages careful attention to client strengths.
Third, a focus on relational efficacy processes in counseling does not ignore
the reality that some problems are rooted in systemic or other issues over
which clients and therapists have little, if any, direct control (but with which
they still need to cope).
Lent 589

Research on the Relational Efficacy Process

A review of the literature on the relational efficacy model is beyond the scope
of this article, yet I can note that around 20 studies using the model have been
published in the sport and exercise psychology literature, thanks in large part
to a fruitful line of research by Jackson, Beauchamp, and their colleagues.
These studies have mainly focused on athlete-athlete and athlete-coach rela-
tionships—a natural focus for the model given the degree to which athletes in
pair or team sports need to coordinate one another’s actions as well as the
extent to which they rely on one another’s and their coaches’ feedback to
assess their skill quality and to weather performance setbacks, as reflected by
the Ian Desmond quote I had referenced earlier. This body of research has
produced a wealth of interesting findings (e.g., Jackson & Beauchamp, 2010;
Jackson, Beauchamp, & Knapp, 2007). Some studies have also applied the
model to such relational contexts as physical rehabilitation (Gere, Martire,
Keefe, Stephens, & Schulz, 2014; Jackson, Dimmock, Taylor, & Hagger,
2012) and financial advising (Yim, Chan, & Lam, 2012).
The model has also been used in counseling psychology, but much less
often than in sport and exercise psychology. The earliest studies examined
relational efficacy beliefs in the context of romantic partners’ relationship
satisfaction and persistence intentions (Lopez & Lent, 1991) and the posthos-
pital adjustment of psychiatric patients (Burke, 1992). More recently, the
model has been used to study research advising (Morrison & Lent, 2014) and
counseling supervision (Morrison, 2016) relationships. These few studies
have focused on the perspectives of only one relationship partner. Studies of
the efficacy belief transmission process are needed that examine both part-
ners’ perspectives, although I know such dyadic data can be hard to come by.

Summary
To offer a few take-home points: Self-efficacy makes a difference. It devel-
ops, changes, stagnates, or soars in a social context. Although Bandura’s
sources of efficacy information tell us a good deal about where self-efficacy
comes from, the tripartite model has the potential to complement Bandura’s
sources by highlighting how efficacy beliefs are transmitted and received in
the context of close interpersonal relationships, especially when perfor-
mances require the coordination of two or more individuals, or when people
are learning new and complex skills or trying to recover from threats to their
sense of efficacy in a salient life domain.
I also believe that activities like counseling and generic social support can
be thought of in terms of their “efficacy-boosting” potential. In fact,
590 The Counseling Psychologist 44(4)

conveying credible and positive other-efficacy messages—or helping people

to believe in their capabilities—may be a key function of counseling, which
itself is a specialized and concentrated form of social support. Moreover,
efficacy-boosting messages can be effectively communicated either in a sup-
portive or in a challenging way but, to have a maximal impact on self-effi-
cacy, it helps for the message to be seen as genuine and for the messenger to
be seen as knowledgeable about the skill in question, the performance con-
text, and the capabilities of the person toward whom the message is directed.
In other words, the relational efficacy process is largely a cognitive and phe-
nomenological one. Reflected efficacy, like so much else in human affairs,
lies in the eye of the beholder.

A Huge Debt of Gratitude

I would like to conclude by singling out some wonderful people in my per-
sonal and career life. I especially need to thank Ellen Balkam Lent—my best
friend and life partner, who is also one terrific counseling and consulting
psychologist. Our son, Jeremy, who is completing his doctorate in philoso-
phy, has allowed me to step back from my professional work and enjoy the
more joyous work that comes with parenting. A heartfelt thanks to the many
mentors who have helped to boost my career self-efficacy at critical
moments—especially Rich Russell, my graduate school advisor. The stu-
dents and other faculty at Ohio State, where I was socialized into the field,
have also been a great source of inspiration.
Steve Brown has been a wonderful collaborator and friend over nearly
four decades now. It has been a tremendous privilege to work with him year
after year. Gail Hackett and Fred Lopez also deserve special thanks, as should
be obvious from my previous remarks. I have also been fortunate to have
other wonderful colleagues and students over the years, both at Maryland and
my earlier professional homes, Minnesota and Michigan State. I want to
thank my good friend and colleague Mark Savickas, who nominated me for
this award. Mark has been a wonderful source of support and professional
role model of mine for many years. Finally, I want to acknowledge Albert
Bandura for creating such a comprehensive theoretical framework that lends
itself so well to extensions in counseling and vocational psychology. As Kurt
Lewin (1951, p. 169) wisely observed long ago, “There is nothing so practi-
cal as a good theory.”

Author’s Note
This article is an edited version of the author’s Leona Tyler Award Address, presented at
the 2015 meeting of the American Psychological Association, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Lent 591

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publica-
tion of this article.

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Author Biography
Robert W. Lent is a professor of counseling psychology in the Department of
Counseling, Higher Education, and Special Education, University of Maryland. His
interests include applications of social cognitive theory to academic and career behav-
ior; counselor development, training, and supervision; and psychological health. He is
co-editor of the Handbook of Counseling Psychology (1st through 4th editions) and
Career Development and Counseling: Putting Theory and Research to Work (1st and
2nd editions).