faculty development ( fd ) developers of universities design and conduct a range of activities to empower the performance of their academic members ( 1 ) . particularly , junior faculties are considered the main target group in fd programs , as they are the universities essential human capital investment ( 2 ) . faculties should participate in educational fd programs in addition to their own professional carrier to enhance their teaching - learning process , research skills , understanding their students , commitment to the department and university and satisfaction with their profession . in fact , acquired knowledge and skill would help the faculties to play their role as a teacher , manager , consulter and a researcher ( 3 ) . 
 
 in 1995 , morley recognized empowerment as a combination of two elements : 1 ) development of strategies to enhance independence , selection , control , and responsibility in individuals , 2 ) provision of the individuals with opportunities to show their competence and learn new capabilities to expand and augment their function ( 4 ) . in fact , empowerment is defined based on the perceptions and personal beliefs of the individuals and includes a process of internal motivation toward executing professional duties ( 5 ) . according to the conducted studies , empowerment is a multidimensional process with five cognitive dimensions of self - effectiveness , self - determination , impact , meaning , and confidence ( 6,7 ) . self - effectiveness indicates that the individuals have the required capabilities and skills to undertake a profession successfully . self - effectiveness or competence is a personal belief with which the person believes that he can fulfill the occupational duties successfully ( 8) . self - determination indicates that capable people feel that they are independent to perform their duties , can decide about their occupational activities , and have the required authority to determine the timing and speed of executing the tasks . impact indicates that capable people feel that they play an important role in attaining the objectives of the organization , have control over occupational results and outcomes , can influence the ongoing matters , and can control limitations and obstacles ( 9 ) . meaning is an opportunity for the individuals to feel that they are following important and worthwhile occupational goals and their time and energy are valuable ( 6 ) . one of the important psychological aspects in empowerment of the personnel in organizations is self - efficacy . believing in self - efficacy is the judgment of the people about their ability to organize and execute a series of activities . the perception of self - efficacy helps with the determination of the tasks that people can accomplish with their knowledge and skills . these individuals are often certain of the successful execution of their tasks ( that are usually successful too ) ( 10 ) . teachers with high self - efficacy have a great impact on the learning of the learners and provide them with challenging situations . they spend more time on their learners , criticize them less , and help them more to solve their problems . teachers with low self - efficacy become frustrated , anxious and depressed in challenging situations . it has been proved that self - efficacy of the teachers is an important factor in educational output indices like learners academic achievement , motivation , and development of feeling of self - efficacy in the learners ( 10 - 13 ) . teachers with a stronger feeling of self - efficacy are more receptive to new ideas and are more willing to examine new ways to meet the needs of the learners . such teachers are more committed to teaching and are more likely to continue this profession ( 14,15 ) . all the activities expected from universities including science discovery and production ( research and development in basic sciences ) , interdisciplinary development ( integration of ideas ) , science application ( the use of science in the real world ) , and teaching are undertaken by faculty members ( 3 ) . workshops and seminars are considered the most common types of fd programs to enhance faculty members skills are ( 16 ) . tehran university of medical sciences ( tums ) also offers fd programs for faculty members that are mandatory for their promotion in the area of medical education . tadbir ( a persian acronym meaning  faculty members development for up - to - date education  ) is a concise six - day course to cover the main concepts of medical education and is designed for faculty members with more than 10 years of work experience . one of the axes related to medical education is discussed on each day of this six - day course ( table 1 ) . also , tums delivers a short - term medical education course designed for faculty members with less than 10 years of experience that is offered in two forms of intensive ( one - month continuous ) and longitudinal courses ( a one - week block followed by one day every week for six months ) . during this course , faculty members become familiar with the principles of medical education more explicitly . although universities frequently hold fd programs , to date , there is scarce evidence focusing on teacher self - efficacy and fd in higher education ( 16 ) . in this study , we evaluated the effect of the three fd courses on the perceived self - efficacy and empowerment of the faculty members . this before - after quasi - experimental study was conducted on 39 faculty members of tums who participated in tadbir , one - month intensive , and six - month longitudinal fd courses in 2013 . the ethical principles of this study were approved by the ethics committee of tehran university of medical sciences ( license number : 15106 ) 
 
 we used the teacher self - efficacy scale ( tss ) presented by schwarzer et al . moreover , the self - reporting scale of short and rinehart was used to assess the participants empowerment ( 18 ) . empowerment scale ( es ) contains 38 items and 5 subscales of efficacy , meaning , impact , autonomy and confidence and it is designed on a 5-point likert scale from first , an english language expert , an educationist skilled in english language , and a psychometric expert translated both scales from english to persian . the translated versions were presented to a number of faculty members who were similar to the study population to ensure the clear understanding of the phrases and to determine its face validity . to address possible errors in translating the phrases , an english expert was requested to translate the scales back to english . the internal consistency and construct validity of the questionnaires were evaluated through the cronbach s alpha and explanatory factor analysis , respectively . tadbir was held in march 2013 with 12 participants , the one - month course was conducted in may 2013 with 15 participants , and the six - month course was held from march to august 2013 with 11 participants . we used explanatory factor analysis , anova , manova , mancova and paired t- test for analysis . ibm spss statistics for windows version 21.0 ( ibm corp . , released 2012 ) was used for data analysis . a total of 39 faculty members participated in tadbir , one - month intensive , and six - month longitudinal educational courses ; of whom , 32 ( 12 in the 6-day , 11 in the one - month , and 9 in the six - month course ) answered both pretest and posttest questionnaires ( response rate=82% ) . no significant difference was observed in the scores of self - efficacy and empowerment between the two groups of female ( n=22 ) and male ( n=10 ) faculty members ( p=0.222 and p=0.157 , respectively ) . moreover , no significant difference was observed in these scores between basic sciences ( n=12 ) and clinical ( n=20 ) faculty members ( p=0.066 and p=0.157 , respectively ) . for explanatory factor analysis of the tss and to perform principal component analysis , the bartlett test of sphericity was first conducted which indicated the appropriateness of the data for factor analysis ( kmo=0.75 , p<0.001 ) . in factor analysis , only one factor was loaded that explained 52.7% of the total variance . the bartlett test of sphericity was used for explanatory factor analysis of the es , and the result was significant ( kmo=0.8 , p<0.001 ) . 
 
 to determine the hidden factors of the es , three indices of eigen value , amount of explained variance and scree plot were considered . to explore the factors concordant with and appropriate for the socio - cultural structure of the sample group , factor analysis with different solutions was performed for several times , and it was finally concluded that the 5-factor solution was more appropriate . the results showed that eigen value of the five factors was greater than 1 and the total variance explained by these factors was 76.08% . the scree plot in figure 2 shows that the explained variance by the factors one to five was considerable compared to other factors . table 3 shows factors , item numbers , eigen values and explained variances . in this analysis , we used varimax rotation and the absolute coefficient value smaller than 0.35 was suppressed . in addition , cronbach s alpha for the components of empowerment scale ( efficacy , meaning , impact , autonomy , confidency and overall ) were ( 0.82 , 0.84 , 0.64 , 0.52 , 0.44 and 0.92 ) , respectively . 
 
 table 4 shows the tss scores of the faculty members before and after attending the three courses and their differences assessed by paired t - test . significant differences were found comparing the mean self - efficacy pre and post test scores of the participants in both the longitudinal ( six - month ) and intensive ( one month ) courses ( p<0.001 and p=0.004 , respectively ) . table 5 presents the total score and scores of the components of the es before and after the three courses and their differences . the total ts scores of both short - term longitudinal and intensive courses increased significantly ( both p<0.001 ) . however , in the intensive one - month course , there was a significant increase just for the components of  meaning  and  autonomy  . no significant difference was found for the total es and its components scores for tadbir course . 
 
 since the participants attending the three courses were not similar , one - way anova was used to explore the differences in their tss and the es components scores before attending the course . table 6 demonstrates the results of anova . according to this table , none of the mentioned variables showed a significant difference among faculty members before entering the courses . accordingly , self - efficacy ( p<0.001 ) and the components of  efficacy  ( p=0.017 ) ,  impact ( p=0.010 ) , and  autonomy  ( p=0.020 ) had a significant difference and  confidence  ( p=0.091 ) had no significant difference . we used the tukey post hoc test to investigate the reason for the significance , which revealed a significant difference in the tss among all the three types of the courses . however , a significant difference was observed between tadbir and longitudinal courses as for all the components of the es . considering the educational course as an independent variable and the post test scores of tss and the es components as dependent variables in a general linear model ( manova ) , there was a statistically significant difference in tss and es components based on the training course ( f=2.815 , p=0.005 ; wilk 's =0.345 , partial =0.413 ) . the tucky post hoc test showed a significant difference in tss among the three types of the courses . however , a significant difference was observed between tadbir and longitudinal courses in all es components . entering tss and the es components as covariates into the model ( mancoca ) showed a significant difference in tss ( p<0.001 ) as well as  meaning  ( p=0.078 ) and  autonomy  ( p=0.034 ) components , but no significant difference was detected in ( p=0.265 ) ,  impact  ( p=0.333 ) and  confidence  ( p=0.266 ) components . workforce empowerment in educational organizations has a significant role in different aspects of development and progress in the society . on the other hand , the psychological feeling of capability has a great effect on job satisfaction and professional commitment of the personnel ( 19 ) . literature has covered the advantages of teacher self - efficacy , but its development process and aspects is not clear ( 21 ) . different studies have evaluated the effect of these training courses ( 22 ) . in one study , the perceived self - efficacy of the faculty members of the penn state college of medicine was evaluated before and after a 9-month fd course ( 23 ) . faculty members perceived increasing and enhancing of their teaching skills , understanding promotion and tenure , career planning , decision making skills , grant - writing skills , communication skills , accessing information , selecting a mentor , and conflict management . 
 
 in another study in 2014 , the fd program of newly hired faculty members was evaluated which included three required and two optional credit courses ( 42 hours each ) covering topics such as teaching methodologies , curriculum design and development , assessment and evaluation , diversity in teaching and learning , professionalism and scholarly practice . participants reported an increase in their confidence in the teaching skills ( 16 ) . 
 
 in this study , we evaluated the effect of medical education courses on perceived self - efficacy and empowerment of the faculty members to examine the difference between concise , short - term intensive ( one - month ) and longitudinal ( six - month ) courses . according to the results , the faculty members showed a significant difference in self - efficacy on pretest and posttest of one - month and six - month courses , indicating that they were confident about the achievement of their tasks ( which are often successful ) ( 10 ) . however , no significant difference was observed in self - efficacy during the concise six - day training course ( tadbir ) . in addition , the scores of  meaning  and  autonomy  showed significant differences in the pretest and posttest of the intensive one - month course while the longitudinal six - month course caused a significant increase in the score of empowerment and all its components . according to the conducted studies , empowerment is a multidimensional concept ( 6,7,24 ) . 
 
 in general , the training courses had a significant effect on the empowerment of the faculty members , maybe because attending these courses helped them to realize the importance of educational activities and the significance of the required skills ; and as a result , they felt empowered in decision - making , management of educational activities , and autonomy after acquiring the skills through attending the courses . however , the concise six - day course ( tadbir ) did not have the expected effect on some components . some other studies have also found that longer training periods result in greater increases in teachers self - efficacy ( 25 ) . 
 
 nonetheless , participants in tadbir had a work experience of more than 10 years while most of the faculty members who participated in short - term courses were newly hired or had a less than 10 years of work experience . a study conducted in the university of california failed to show any significant relationship between work experience as a faculty member and perceived self - efficacy ( 26 ) . however , the difference can be a reason for the obtained results as a confounding factor . based on the bandura 's theory of self - efficacy , mastery teaching experience and skills during the first years of a faculty member s career would have a significant influence on development of his / her long - term self - efficacy ( 27 ) . moreover , we found no difference in perceived self - efficacy between men and women , which is similar to the findings of the california study ( 26 ) . in general , it seems that long - term longitudinal educational courses are more effective than intensive and concise ones . therefore , to make effective changes , the necessary training should be offered in a longitudinal fashion during long - term courses . however , this study suffered some limitations like the low number of participants , differences in their participation in different courses , and lack of evaluation of the quality of the offered courses . therefore , it is suggested to conduct studies with a better design to confirm the results of this study . it is also recommended to perform qualitative studies to determine the reasons for the obtained results . this research has been supported by tehran university of medical sciences and health services grant 90 - 03 - 133 - 15106 . the authors also thank educational development center of tehran university of medical sciences for holding the workshops and cooperation in data collection .
background : 
 teachers self - efficacy and development may be conceptualized as their beliefs in their own ability to plan , organize and carry out activities that are required to attain educational goals . in this study , we examined the effect of different medical education training courses ( six - day , one- month short- term and sixmonth long- term courses ) on perceived self - efficacy and development . 
 methods : this before - after quasi - experimental study was performed on 39 faculty members of tehran university of medical sciences who participated in faculty development courses in 2013 . 
 we used valid and reliable scales to measure their perceived self - efficacy and empowerment . 
 results : the results revealed a significant increase in faculty members perceived self - efficacy in pre and posttests in one - month and six - month courses , but no significant difference was found in the six - day course ( p=0.004 , p<0.001 and p=0.235 , respectively ) . 
 these results were the same for perceived empowerment ( p<0.001 , p<0.001 and p=0.716 for one - month , six - month and six - day courses , respectively ) . 
 a significant difference was detected in perceived self - efficacy and participant empowerment components based on the training course ( p=0.005 ; wilk 's =0.345 , partial 2=0.413 ) . 
 conclusion : this study revealed that long- term courses were more effective than the short- term ones . 
 thus , longitudinal courses are recommended for more effectiveness .