Overview
The article will briefly goes over some key findings in regards to the personal and informants’ assessments of my interpersonal and intrapersonal skills. The informants include someone who knows me personally, someone who I know from teamwork in school, and someone I just met in this course. To summary and better present the findings; I have attached several graphs under appendix section for a further discussion. Figure 1 presents the interpersonal and intrapersonal scores based on five categories among myself and different informants. It will be used as a set of core data to evaluate my interpersonal and intrapersonal skills. Figure 2 shows the mean scores between informants and me. I used my scores as the base mark conduct the comparisons. It is used to illustrate the discrepancies between my assessment and other informants’ evaluations.
Social Skills
Social skills entail the ability to communicate and interact with others in a way that is a appropriate and effective. (Segrin, C. & Flora, J, 2000). As Figure 2 showed, my scores are significantly lower than the informants. It is a good indicator that people are generally satisfied to talk or work with me while it seems that I’m not confident with my social skills. However, it must be noted that my lacking of confidence may relates to self-esteem problem.
Self-Control
Self-control can be defined as the effortful attempts by a person to change thoughts, feelings, and behaviours in order to reach long-term interests or goals (Muraven & Baumeister, 2000). According to Figure 1, the close friend’s score is close to mine while the other informants’ scores are much lower. It indicates that I behave a bit too relaxed in front of normal friends and strangers. I should be careful with self-control in the public.
Attitude towards Authority
Attitudes toward authority defined as a tendency to act me an obedient manner under an implied command. As Figure 2 illustrated, my score is similar to the mean score; however, Figure 1 shows that there is a major discrepancy between my score and the score from my colleague. It means that I showed more respect to authority under the setting of a professional environment.
Self Esteem
According to Harter, self-esteem is the perception that one person have about their own ability. (Harter, 1990). Figure 1 showed that there is a considerable difference between my score and informants’, especially between my close friend and others. It confirms that I always hold a negative feeling of self-worth. Thus, I choose this skill to improve and details will be discussed later.
Self-Monitoring
As Figure 1 and 2 presented, there are some deviations between my score and the informants’ score. It indicates I actually have a weaker self-presentation in the view of public. Again, it indicates similar findings as that of self-control, which I should have better self-presentation in the public.
Self Esteem
As discussed above, a significant deviation is found between my own assessment and the informants’ ratings. The differences may due to the difference attitudes towards the self-worth. The big variance between my close friend’s rating and other informants confirms it as well. Since my close friend is aware of this issue to some extent, his score will be considerably higher than the other informants who are not aware of this issue. The questionnaire is reliable since the writer estimate three forms of reliability: Internal consistency, test-retest and interrater reliability (Judge, T. A. 2003). The data are collected from four independent samples with larger volume of informants. Based on the reasons above, I believe the data collected is a good indicator of my self-esteem problem, and can provide some insights for me on evaluating my weakness.
An example for my lacking of self-esteem is that I seldom express my opinion in the lecture. Sometimes I have some thoughts to share, but I am afraid to say them out in the class because I am so worried if I make any mistakes. I am more willing to share the ideas to people I know other than people I just met. I am not sure if my ideas are helpful to the strangers and I am concerned about the possible bad consequences if I say something wrong. As a summary, these scenarios indicate that sometimes I will not view myself positively and judge myself insignificant.
Self-esteem has been proposed to motivate people to strengthen social ties and secure acceptance in the service of survival (Hart, Shaver, & Goldenberg, 2005). In my opinion, self-esteem is related to social skill. As shown on Figure 1, there is a big gap between my assessment and other’s assessment in terms of my social skill. Based on my past experience and this assessment, I believe one biggest factor that leads to this result should be self-esteem problem. As discussed above, I always judge myself insignificant, and I fear others would think the same if I express too much to the public. For example, one can be a bad speaker, it may because he does not have the sufficient social skill, or it may due to his low self-esteem problem which makes him afraid to speak out in the public.
According to Rosenberg’s empirical research, people with low self-esteem tend to exaggerate negative events and are bothered by failure. They usually take things personal and easier to get angry. They also refuse or avoid making social connections with others, and have low levels of confidence (Rosenberg, & Owen, 2001). In addition, unacceptable level of self-esteem is a strong predictor of depression. “Individuals with low self-esteem, and/or whose self-esteem declined further during the adolescent years, were more likely to exhibit symptoms of depression 2 decades later as adults.” (Steiger, A. E., 2014). However, people with high self-esteem are usually satisfied with life, earning more money, perceived efficacy and most likely to be success in their career (Harter, 1987).
Low self-esteem has a significant influence on the performance as a leader. As leaders, they should be able to communicate with others efficiently. People with low self-esteem are generally afraid to share opinions with others. Also, he/she may take things personally and lose temper easily. It definitely has bad influence over the team harmony and will decrease the work efficiency in the long term.