Movement Catalysts’ Self-Awareness – A Factor in Fruitfulness

EMQ » July–September 2023 » Volume 59 Issue 4

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Summary: Healthy self-awareness is a key quality of effective pioneer missionaries such as movement catalysts because cultural awareness relies heavily on healthy self-awareness. Research shows that effective movement catalysts demonstrate mature self-awareness concerning their personal traits and ministry competencies, and are especially aware of their own shortcomings. Thus, self-awareness is an important trait of effective pioneer missionaries and contributes to their ability to catalyze a movement.

By Gene Daniels and Emanuel Prinz

Self-awareness is increasingly recognized as a key leadership quality because a growing body of empirical research associates it with successful leadership.[i] There are likely many reasons for this, but Paul Trapnell and Jennifer Campbell theorized that a leader’s self-awareness not only increases their capacity for personal growth but also exerts a motivational and emotional influence on others.[ii] Consequently, we might describe a self-aware leader as a dynamic, motivational, and influential person.

Such a leader would be a great asset in any Christian endeavor, but our focus is specific to the context of pioneer church-planting ministry. A study by Bethany Research Institute provided the first ever empirical investigation[iii] into the traits and competencies of effective catalysts of Christward movements.[iv] Over 300 pioneer church-planters were surveyed. Respondents rated themselves, on a scale of one to five, on a series of 95 questions which probed certain traits and competencies. In addition, some of the participants invited observer ratings from either a teammate, friend, or family member.

Because the self-reporting can be compared with the observer rating, this aspect of the study allows us to explore the self-awareness of this particular group of respondents. But what do we mean by self-awareness, specifically in the life of a pioneer church-planter?

Conceptual Understanding of Self-Awareness

Philosophers have long expressed an interest in self-awareness, with literature on the subject as early as 500 BC in China and 600 BC in India.[v] One of the better-known modern investigations on the subject is A Theory of Objective Self-awareness by Shelley Duval and Robert Wicklund.[vi] They postulate that a person is aware of themselves, or emotionally aware, when they exhibit the ability to focus on themselves and how actions, thoughts, and emotions either do or do not align with their internal standards.

Many others have attempted to build on this, and to examine the way that self-awareness relates to effective leadership. In one of the largest recent studies on the topic, a meta-study of 10 different studies including over 5,000 participants, Tasha Eurich contends that two broad categories of self-awareness exist.

The first she calls internal self-awareness: how clearly we see our own values, passions, feelings, behaviors, strengths and weaknesses, and their impact on others. The other dimension she terms external self-awareness, meaning that we understand how other people view us along these same lines. Eurich’s research links both dimensions to several positive traits and qualities such as the ability to communicate more effectively, being less likely to lie or cheat, and to being a generally more effective leader.[vii] 

These observations from organizational psychology serve as a good place to start, but would be incomplete for our purposes without a consideration of distinctly Christian perspectives on self-awareness.  Five centuries ago, theologian John Calvin understood that thinking about God requires certain human capacities. Thus, in the introduction to his well-known, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin writes, “Without knowledge of self there is no knowledge of God … The knowledge of God and of ourselves is connected. Without knowledge of self there is no knowledge of God. Without knowledge of God there is no knowledge of self.”[viii]

The apostle Paul makes a similar point in Romans 12:3 when he writes: “For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned” (ESV).

Here Scripture admonishes us to avoid two extremes in self-assessment: exalting ourselves because of pride and underrating the work of God in our lives out of false humility.

If we synthesize the psychological, theological, and biblical perspectives, we can form a distinctly Christian view of self-awareness. We would define the self-aware Christian as someone who has a sober, balanced judgment about how their actions, thoughts, and emotions align with God’s revealed will for humanity. He or she also understands how others perceive them on these matters. Additionally, since we are considering self-awareness among pioneer missionaries, these others should include people of a different culture than their own. With these thoughts as a foundation, let us consider how something concretely measured through empirical research can serve as a proxy for something more abstract – self-awareness. 

Research and Self-Awareness

Social behavioral research such as our study on effective movement catalysts’ traits and competencies is driven by self-reported data, which provides rich insights into a participant’s internal life that external observation cannot. Although this is a major strength, researchers also recognize the potential for participant response bias. This usually occurs through either intentionally misleading answers, or a lack of self-awareness. Since our study involved mature Christian leaders, we can reasonably rule out the former, which leaves us with the latter. Therefore, if the data does not give evidence of significant response bias, we may conclude that the respondents were reasonably self-aware.

Empirical Evidence

One way to examine the reliability of self-assessments is to complement them with the observer ratings of a third person. A 360-degree assessment, the most reliable and involved approach, includes four ratings: (1) self-assessment, (2) assessment by a direct supervisor, (3) a direct report assessment, and (4) a peer assessment.

Unfortunately, we were unable to solicit this level of participation from the network of mission pioneers who responded to the survey. However, to conceptually verify the use of self-assessment for this particular project, we did obtain a small number of observer ratings for certain participants. While this limited pool was somewhat disappointing, it applies to almost all trait studies because observer ratings are generally hard to solicit.[ix]

We obtained a total of 18 observer ratings, of which six were teammates, one was a friend, one was an adult daughter, and the remaining ten were spouses.

Survey partici-pant	Observer invited by survey participant	Participant’s average self-rating	Observer’s average  rating	Comparison of observer rating to participant’s self-rating
#1	Teammate	4.41	3.95	-0.46 (lower)
#23	Teammate	4.77	4.88	+0.11 (similar)
#24	Spouse	4.05	4.07	+0.02 (similar)
#117	Teammate	4.52	4.64	+0.12 (similar)
#147	Spouse	4.16	4.20	+0.04 (similar)
#150	Teammate	3.93	4.34	+0.41 (higher)
#154	Teammate	4.18	4.16	-0.02 (similar)
#157	Spouse	3.69	3.61	-0.07 (similar)
#158	Spouse	3.68	4.59	+0.91 (higher)
#241	Spouse	4.20	4.25	+0.05 (simlar)
#269	Spouse	3.83	4.58	+0.75 (higher)
#274	Spouse	3.84	4.41	+0.57 (higher)
#281	Friend	4.05	4.80	+0.75 (higher)
#289	Spouse	3.74	4.72	+0.98 (higher)
#306	Co-worker	4.20	4.27	+0.07 (similar)
#307	Spouse	4.45	4.68	+0.23 (higher)
#308	Daughter	4.16	3.80	-0.36 (lower)
#309	Spouse	3.72	4.31	+0.59 (higher)
Average	n/a	4.09	4.35	+0.26 (higher)

Caption: Figure 13.1 – Comparison of self-rating with observer rating.

This chart shows that on average, observers gave the catalysts they knew higher ratings than the pioneers had given themselves. In two cases, observer ratings were nearly a full Likert scale point higher than the pioneers’ self-ratings. Overall, the difference was not large; nevertheless, it was still statistically significant, at about one-quarter of a Likert point.

One way to test if the results from a small sample are potentially true for the larger study population is to check for systemic bias, which occurs when the wording of survey questions artificially produce a general trend. Fortunately, this can be eliminated by conducting a Pearson correlation test to determine the strength of association between the two variables. In this case, the association between answers by study participants and their observers were weak,[x] thus making systemic bias unlikely. In other words, the structure of the data set recommends that we view the observers’ ratings as their honest assessment of the pioneer who had invited them to participate.

Interpretation

Although limited in quantity, the data gleaned from these observer ratings points strongly toward three important insights about the self-awareness of the pioneers in our study. First, since the differences in the ratings do not indicate any systemic bias (either positive or negative), they suggest that these pioneers view their own traits and competencies much the same way as those around them. This provides an almost textbook example of Eurich’s point that those who are truly self-aware have an integrated view of themselves that aligns their internal self-perspective with the external perspective of others.[xi]        

Second, we saw that on average that the pioneers rated themselves lower than their observers did, suggesting that their self-assessments were not inflated, but rather the reverse – quite modest. Or to use Paul’s terminology, they demonstrated a “sober judgment” (Romans 12:3) of their own traits and competencies. As Christians, we would not only expect this from mature mission field leaders – we would consider it clear evidence of the respondents’ self-awareness.

The answers pioneers gave to certain inverted questions in the survey provide further testimony to this. As a means of testing survey wording reliability, we probed some traits and competencies by means of both positive and negative (inverted) questions. For example:

Question 34: When things get hard, I am tenacious and push through until the job is done.

And its inverse:

Question 50: I tend to stop trying when things get very hard.

From the perspective of self-awareness, these inverted questions provide an opportunity for the pioneers to critique themselves very directly. Given the limited sample size, a statistical analysis was not warranted, but an interesting trend is worth noting. For each of the inverted questions,[xii] the pioneers rated themselves much lower than their paired observers, and significantly lower than the rating difference for the positively worded questions for the same trait or competency. In other words, when given an opportunity to rate it directly, they demonstrated a keen awareness of their own weakness. This accords well with findings from many different professional fields, ranging as widely as medicine to law, that the ability to accurately self-critique is been connected to healthy self-awareness.[xiii]

Unfortunately, there is one key part of our definition of self-awareness that the data cannot address: the other as a cross-cultural observer. Earlier in the article we raised the point that since we are considering self-awareness among pioneer missionaries, the others whose perceptions we need to hear should come from a different culture than the pioneer. Due to the limitations of the sample, none of the observers who contributed to this study came from a culture different from the pioneer they were assessing This could possibly form the basis of a useful follow-up study.  

Conclusions

Having a healthy self-awareness is recognized as a key quality of effective leaders, as empirical studies have confirmed.[xiv] This applies all the more in the case of pioneer missionaries such as movement catalysts since cultural awareness relies heavily on healthy self-awareness.[xv] Therefore, we believe the following findings from the Bethany Research Institute study are noteworthy: 

1. Effective movement catalysts demonstrate mature and realistic self-awareness concerning their important personal traits and ministry competencies.
2. When compared to observer ratings, they score themselves lower, evidence of their humility and modesty.
3. They appear to be especially aware of their own shortcomings.

Taken together, these demonstrate the importance of self-awareness as one more trait of effective pioneer church-planters in a larger cluster of socio-influential competencies which contribute to movement catalyzing. For this reason, mentors who encourage young missionaries to develop this trait could play an important role in helping them reach their full potential in service of God’s kingdom.

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[i] Greg Ashley and Roni Reiter-Palmon, “Self-Awareness and the Evolution of Leaders: The Need for a Better Measure of Self-Awareness,” Journal of Behavioral and Applied Management 14, no. 1 (2012): 2–17.

[ii] P. D. Trapnell and J. D. Campbell, “Private Self-Consciousness and the Five-Factor Model of Personality: Distinguishing Rumination from Reflection,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 76, no. 2 (1999): 284–304, https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.76.2.284.

[iii] Emanuel Prinz, David Lewis, and Alison Goldhor, “Catalyst Competence Research: An Empirical Investigation into the Traits and Competencies of Effective Movement Catalysts and Other Factors Contributing to and Impeding Movements” (Bloomington, MS: Bethany Research Institute, 2021), unpublished.

[iv] We define a movement as a rapid indigenous multiplication of disciples making disciples, and churches planting churches, consisting of multiple streams reaching a fourth generation of church multiplication.

[v] M. R. Leary and N. R. Buttermore, “The Evolution of the Human Self: Tracing the Natural History of Self-Awareness,” Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 33, no. 4 (2003): 365–404, https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1468-5914.2003.00223.x.

[vi] Shelley Duval and Robert Wicklund, A Theory of Self-Awareness (New York: Academic Press, 1972).

[vii] Tasha Eurich, “What Self-Awareness Really Is (and How to Cultivate it),” Harvard Business Review online, January 4, 2018, accessed December 6, 2021, https://hbr.org/2018/01/what-self-awareness-really-is-and-how-to-cultivate-it.

[viii] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2008), 5.

[ix] Colbert et al, “Assessing the Trait Theory of Leadership using Self and Observer Ratings of Personality: The Mediating Role of Contributions to Group Success,” The Leadership Quarterly 23, no. 4 (2012): 670–685, https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1016/j.leaqua.2012.03.004.

[x] Pearson correlation is a statistical measure of the strength of association between two variables, and the direction of that relationship, either positive or negative. A value of 1 (either + or -) indicates a perfect degree of association between the variable. The closer to 0, the weaker the relationship is. In this case the value was +0.22.

[xi] Eurich, “What Self-Awareness Really Is.”

[xii] Seven traits and competencies were probed by either one or two inverted questions.

[xiii] Beryl Blaustone, “Teaching Law Students to Self-Critique and to Develop Critical Self Awareness in Performance” (PhD diss., City University of New York, School of Law, 2006). Imad Mohamad, “Identifying Cultural Framework for Assessing Cultural Components in Client Systems and Recommendations for Agency and Practitioner Level Culturally Responsive Practice” (Mankota, MN: Minnesota State University, 2013), accessed December 10, 2021, https://cornerstone.lib.mnsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1863&context=etds.

[xiv] Ashley and Reiter-Palmon, “Self-Awareness,” 2–17.

[xv] C. Lu and C. Wan, “Cultural Self-Awareness as Awareness of Culture’s Influence on the Self: Implications for Cultural Identification and Well-Being,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 44, no. 6 (2018): 823–837.

EMQ, Volume 59, Issue 4. Copyright © 2023 by Missio Nexus. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced or copied in any form without written permission from Missio Nexus. Email: EMQ@MissioNexus.org.