Becoming Confident: A Model of Women’s Confidence Embodiment in the Workplace

Recent and persistent focus on the self-confidence of women in the workplace, particularly in popular and practice literature (Kay & Shipman, 2014; Warrell, 2016), has prompted a new surge of empirical research on self-confidence and gender. Few historical studies address self-confidence in organizational contexts and investigate gender’s influence on confidence (see for example Lenney, 1977; McCarty, 1986). The pervading theory on core confidence (Stajkovic, 2006; Stajkovic, Lee, Greenwald & Raffiee, 2015) attempts to re-establish confidence (vs. self-confidence) as a second order construct related to more familiar theories of general self-efficacy (Chen, Gully, & Eden, 2001), hope (Snyder, Cheavens, & Sympson, 1997), resilience (Wagnild & Young, 1993), and optimism (Scheier & Carver, 1985). However, the situational nature of confidence (i.e., that confidence emerges differently or not at all depending on the environmental and relational context) has not been adequately investigated and requires researchers to consider a broader scope of phenomenological dimensions in order to examine the gendered nature of confidence. Using qualitative survey responses of the confidence experiences of 300 women, we investigate how women in the workplace experience confidence to unveil dimensions of the phenomenon that are not well defined in the extant literature. We advance a conceptual model of the sensemaking process of women’s confidence embodiment in the workplace. Keywords: Confidence; Enactment; Embodiment; Gender; Sensemaking