Now more than ever before, organizational cultures are seeking out high performance players and office workers always seem to be pressured to do their work faster while still maintaining perfect results. A secretary, whose main job is to support and a...
Now more than ever before, organizational cultures are seeking out high performance players and office workers always seem to be pressured to do their work faster while still maintaining perfect results. A secretary, whose main job is to support and assist his/her boss, is more than likely a good role example to this phenomenon. Unfortunately, it turns out through study, this perfectionism is usually unrealizable and results to mental suffering or delay of task performance.
In the past, there have been studies regarding Perfectionism and Academic Procrastination for students, but found limitations when evaluating mature people such as office workers.
The purpose of this study was to look into General Self-Efficacy and Work Procrastination for office workers, especially secretaries, and analyzing its relation. Additional study about General Self-Efficacy’s Mediator Effect in how perfectionism affects work procrastination was also done in the research.
In the pilot study, exploratory factor analysis was performed through 147 questionnaires using 5 scales, to measure perfectionism, general self-efficacy, and work procrastination in a research web site. By using exploratory factor analysis, 53 questions were selected and used in the final survey.
In the final study, the extracted questions from the pilot study were used in a research web site. A total of 203 questionnaires were collected and 163 of them were used for analysis. Once again, exploratory factor analysis was performed and conducts were extracted. A confirmatory factor analysis was also done in order to distinguish Personal Standards Perfectionism and Evaluation Concerns Perfectionism. Low ranks for personal standards perfectionism were self-oriented perfectionism and personal standards, and for evaluation concerns perfectionism were socially prescribed perfectionism, concern over mistakes, and doubts about action. The results suggest that Blankstein and Dunkley(2000)’s Perfectionism theory applies to secretaries as well.
After analyzing Personal Standards Perfectionism, Evaluation Concerns Perfectionism, and correlation of Work Procrastination and General Self-Efficacy, personal standards perfectionism showed meaningful significant negative correlation with work procrastination while evaluation concerns perfectionism showed vice versa. Research of secretary’s perfectionism and work procrastination relation has been done to observe the role performance of self efficacy. After research, self efficacy indeed showed perfect role mediating effect between personal standards perfectionism and work procrastination. Evaluation concerns perfectionism and work procrastination also showed perfect role mediating effect. This explains why detail intervention to increase self efficacy is needed in order to decrease work procrastination causing from secretary’s perfectionism.
This research had two meaningful results. First, utilizing perfectionism theory allows researcher to analyze specific studies such as secretary’s general self efficacy and work procrastination. Second, it is important to increase self efficacy to decrease work procrastination effect that comes out from a secretary’s perfectionism. Proposing its specific study and training should also be done.