This study adds to the limited body of research on self-leadership—at the heart of which is self-talk—and it’s impact on leaders’ performance. The research that has been done on leaders’ self-talk has not yet looked at the promising effects of self-distancing in one’s self-talk, which has only been examined in the clinical literature. Consistent with the research that does exist on self-distancing, the researcher hypothesized that higher levels of self-distancing would be associated with stronger leader performance along with better self-awareness and that these relationships would be moderated by managerial status (such that the relationship would be stronger for first-time managers, when self-leadership is especially critical during the transition). The results for all three hypotheses were not significant. Even though there was a lack of promising findings, there were some limitations to this study that likely inhibited the ability to uncover relationships: namely the distal outcome of job performance, the secondary nature of the data, and the limited coding scheme. The researcher puts forth ideas for overcoming these limitations with the hopes of continuing to explore this promising line of research.
