Importance of Increasing Self Esteem in the Workplace

In the modern world that we live in today, the concept self-esteem is constantly being used in our daily lives such as the workplace, home and even school. But what exactly does the term self-esteem means? In this essay, we will learn more about self-esteem, concepts correlated to self-esteem and how one can increase his self-esteem at the workplace.

As defined by Myers (2008), self-esteem simply means an individual’s overall sense of self-worth. Basically, how highly or lowly we think of ourselves is related to how high or how low our self-esteem will be. As with attitudes, there are two forms of self-esteem – explicit and implicit (Myers, 2008, p. 54). Explicit self-esteem occurs on a conscious level on the individual whereas implicit self-esteem occurs outside of one’s awareness. So, is a high self-esteem individual a better choice of a candidate in the workplace as compared to one with a low self-esteem? An individual with a high self-esteem would be more likely to be obnoxiously loud and interrupts people while they are talking. Compared with a low self-esteem individual, they are shy and modest, a vast difference than one with high self-esteem (Myers, 2008, p.53).

Another notion is that there are three ways to define self-esteem (Brown, Dutton, & Cook, 2001) – global self-esteem, self-evaluations & feelings of self-worth. A simple explanation that relates all the three definition above would be of how people feel about themselves, how one would evaluate his various abilities and the feelings that one would get depending on the situation that he is in (Brown et al., 2001).

Self-esteem has also been correlated with concepts like self-control. Forcing self-control on an individual will simply wear them down. This i...

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...rs (2008, p.71), is the act of expressing oneself and behaving in ways that creates favorable impression close to their ideal impression. By having done a good job at helping the project becoming a success, he is able to project himself as a confident person who knows what he wants.

In the long run, he is able to cope better at the workplace if he exercises his internal locus of control and by being adaptive to the environment. Not only will his self-esteem increase just in the workplace, his overall fulfillment in life will be more achieving with a moderate amount of self-esteem, self-presentation and self-control.

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References:

Brown, J.D., Dutton, K.A. & Cook, K.E. (2001). ‘From the top down: Self –esteem and Self-evaluation’, Cognition & Emotion, 15:5, 615 – 631.

Myers, D.G. (2008). Social Psychology. Boston: McGraw-Hill Higher Education.