9
Motivate Employee Performance through Goal Setting
GARY P. LATHAM
Goal setting theory (Latham and Locke, 2007) provides a framework that specifies the most valid and practical ways of increasing employee motivation. This conclusion has been reached by multiple authors working independently (e.g. Earley and Lee, 1992; Miner, 1984; Pinder, 2008). The conclusion is based on the fact that the theory has been shown in more than 1000 studies to predict, influence, and explain the behavior of thousands of people in numerous countries (e.g. Australia, Canada, the Caribbean, England, Germany, Israel, Japan, and the USA), in both laboratory and field settings, involving more than 100 different tasks in occupations that included logging, word processing, engineering, and university scholarship (Locke and Latham, 1990; Mitchell and Daniels, 2003). Although developed as a theory of motivation in the workplace, it has been used effectively in sport psychology (Weinberg, 1994). The theory has even been found useful for promoting the motivational processes of brain-injured patients (Gauggel, 1999; Prigatano, Wong, Williams, and Plenge, 1997).
The theory states that the simplest, most direct motivational explanation of why some people perform better than others is because they have different performance goals (Latham and Locke, 1991). The essence of the theory is four-fold (Locke and Latham, 1990). First, difficult specific goals lead to significantly higher performance than easy goals, no goals, or even the setting of an abstract goal such as urging people to do their best. Second, holding ability constant, as this is a theory of motivation, and given that there is goal commitment, the higher the goal the higher the performance. Third, personality traits and incentives influence an individual’s behavior, at least in part, to the extent that they lead to the setting of and commitment to a specific difficult goal. Fourth, goal setting, in addition to affecting the three mechanisms of motivation, namely, choice, effort, and persistence, can also have a cognitive benefit. It can influence the motivation to discover ways to attain the goal (Seijts and Latham, 2005).
There are at least four subprinciples necessary for deriving the motivational benefits of goal setting. The goal must be challenging and specific, feedback must be provided on progress in relation to goal attainment, ways must be found to maintain goal commitment, and resources must be provided for and obstacles removed to goal attainment.
Set challenging specific goals
The goal must be both challenging and specific. Given adequate ability and commitment to the goal, the higher the goal the higher the performance. This is because people normally adjust their level of effort to the difficulty of the goal. In addition to being targets to attain, goals are the standards by which one judges one’s adequacy or success. Challenging goals facilitate pride in accomplishment. People with low goals are minimally satisfied with low performance attainment, and become increasingly satisfied with every level of attainment that exceeds their goal. This is also true for individuals with a high goal. To be minimally satisfied, they must accomplish more than those who have a low goal. Consequently, they set a high goal to attain before they will be satisfied with their accomplishment. In short, to be satisfied, employees with high standards must accomplish more than those with low standards. In addition, an employee’s outcome expectancies are typically higher for the attainment of high rather than low goals because the outcome one can expect from attaining a challenging goal usually includes such factors as an increase in feelings of self-efficacy, personal effectiveness, recognition from peers, a salary increase, a job promotion, etc. As a result people, in most instances, readily commit to a high goal if they believe they have the ability to attain it.
Goal specificity facilitates an employee’s focus in that it makes explicit what it is the individual should choose to do or try to accomplish. If the goal specifies A, then B and C will be downplayed. Specificity also facilitates measurement or feedback on progress toward goal attainment. A drawback of an abstract goal such as “do your best” is that it allows people to give themselves the benefit of the doubt concerning the adequacy of their performance (Kernan and Lord, 1988). Thus their maximum effort is not aroused. For feedback to be used intelligently, it must be interpreted in relation to a specific goal. Goal specificity clarifies for employees what constitutes effective performance.
For goal setting to be maximally effective, the goal and the measure of performance effectiveness used must be aligned. Thus, if a logging crew wants to increase productivity by 15%, the performance measure must be the number of trees cut down divided by the hours worked. If the director of an organization’s RandD division wishes to increase line managers’ satisfaction with the unit, the goal set can be a specific increase in the frequency of behaviors emitted that have been identified through job analysis as necessary for line management’s satisfaction. Goals and the measures of their attainment that have appeared in the scientific literature include physical effort, quantity and quality measures of production, costs, profits, and job behaviors.
Challenging, specific goals affect effort and persistence (Latham and Locke, 1991, 2007). When no time limits are imposed, a specific high goal induces people to work harder or longer than is the case when a low or abstract goal is set. Without time limits, a specific high goal induces people to work until the goal is attained. With time limits, difficult specific goals lead to more effort per unit of time. The American Pulpwood Association found that when paper companies impose quotas on the number of days that they will buy wood from pulpwood crews, the crews cut as much wood in the restricted number of days as they do in a normal five-day work week (Latham and Locke, 1975).
In summary, setting specific challenging goals is important for increasing both job performance and job satisfaction. Job satisfaction is the result of an appraisal of one’s performance against one’s goals. Job satisfaction is not a result of the person alone or the job alone, but of the person in relation to the job. To the extent that one’s job performance is appraised as fulfilling or facilitating the attainment of one’s goals, satisfaction is high (Latham and Brown, 2006; Latham, Locke, and Fassina, 2002). For example, in a study conducted in Germany, there were no data to suggest that those who had high goals experienced feelings of exhaustion. Only those employees who perceived their goals were difficult to attain experienced an increase in positive and a decrease in negative effect, an increase in job satisfaction, and perceptions of occupational success over a three-year timeframe. An unexpected finding was that lack of goal attainment in one’s personal life was related to higher degrees of subjective well-being when the person experienced goal progress on the job (Wiese and Freund, 2005).
Provide feedback in relation to goals
A truism attributed to the late Mason Haire is “that which gets measured gets done.” This is because the act of measurement conveys cogently what the organization truly values versus what it may state that it values. However, the accuracy of Haire’s statement is improved through the insertion of the word goals: that which is measured in relation to goals is done. Both goal setting theory and empirical research indicate that in the absence of goal setting, feedback has no effect on performance. This is because feedback is only information; its effect on action depends on how it is appraised and what decisions are made with respect to it.
For example, the Weyerhaeuser Company found that engineers and scientists who were urged to do their best after receiving a performance appraisal performed no better than their counterparts in a control group. A significant increase in performance occurred only among those engineers and scientists who received feedback in relation to specific high goals (Latham, Mitchell, and Dossett, 1978).
Feedback moderates the effect of goal setting. Without feedback, the positive benefit of goal setting is minimized (Erez, 1977). This is because goals direct effort and persistence. Feedback allows people to discern what they should continue doing, stop doing, or start doing to attain the goal.
Gain goal commitment
Commitment is the sine qua non of goal setting. Without it, goal setting is a meaningless exercise. Two primary ways to gain commitment are to focus on an individual’s outcome expectancies and self-efficacy (see Chapter 10, this volume).
A downside of setting challenging specific goals is that people may obtain tangible evidence that they did not attain them. A teenager may have test scores that provide strong evidence of failure in math. An employee in a consulting firm may have hours and hours of wasted effort, non-billable hours, on a potential client who subsequently took the business to a competitor. The result can be feelings of loss of control. People learn on the basis of evidence (e.g. revenue, client surveys, staff turnover) that they have failed to attain their goal no matter how much they truly tried to attain it. Through such repeated experiences they typically “learn” to give up; they learn helplessness. Thus there are employees who have learned that they cannot increase revenue from existing clients, they have learned that they are poor at bringing in new clients, and that they are not able to work effectively with staff. They have tangible evidence to support their conclusions that they should give up their attempts to attain their goal.
The solutions for maintaining goal commitment are at least two-fold. A first step, as noted above, is to focus on outcome expectancies. The role of a coach is to help people see the relationship between what they do and the outcome of their actions; to help people realize the outcomes that they can expect as a result of what they do. An early example of how outcome expectancies affect goal commitment can be found in a study by Lashley (1929). A man, after 900 repetitions, was still unable to master the alphabet. But after he was offered 100 cigarettes if he could learn the alphabet in a week, he proceeded to do so in only 10 trials.
Because the concept of outcome expectancies is as useful in one’s personal life as it is in an organizational setting, allow me to share a personal example. I arrived home one day to discover my four children on the front step. They greeted me with the warning not to enter the house as Mom was in a horrific mood. As she had walked across the kitchen floor, her foot had come out of a shoe that had stuck to dried milk. As she fell, her hand braced her from injury as it slipped into an open dishwasher that oozed with leftover breakfast food.
To announce that I will solve the problem would not only have been lunacy on my part, it would have fostered dependence: “Let’s wait until Dad gets here; he can fix anything.” To look for blame would have been equally fool-hardy on my part: “So what did you do to get your mother in such a bad mood?” “I don’t know.” “It wasn’t me.” “She is always in a bad mood.” I bet you did something, Dad.”
The primary job of a coach is to improve performance rather than focus on blame. This is done through increasing the person’s sense of control regarding the attainment of their goals. It is done by helping people to realize the outcomes they can expect from engaging in specific actions. Thus, I simply asked each of them: “What can you do within the next 30 seconds to improve Mom’s mood?” Setting a goal focuses attention on discovering solutions to its attainment.
One son offered to clean the kitchen, another said he would get us both a drink, the third said he would make dinner. My daughter quietly ran off to prepare a bath for my wife. The outcome, as expected, was a dramatic upswing in my wife’s affect and behavior.
A four cell empathy box can be used to understand: (1) the outcomes an employee expects from committing to a goal, (2) the negative outcomes expected from goal commitment, (3) the positive outcomes expected from sticking with the status quo, and (4) the negative outcomes expected from doing so. Understanding outcome expectancies enabled a forest products company to shift the dishonest (theft) to honest behavior in the workforce (Latham, 2001). The empathy box is shown in Figure 9.1. The five questions asked are as follows: (1) What positive outcomes do you expect from committing to and pursuing the goal? (2) What negative outcomes do you expect from committing to and pursuing the goal? (3) What positive outcomes do you expect from rejecting or ignoring the goal? (4) What negative outcomes do you expect from rejecting or ignoring the goal? (5) What would have to change for you to commit to the goal (look for answers in cells 2 and 3)?
FIGURE 9.1 The empathy box
This empathy box provides a systematic way to “walk in another person’s shoes.” To the extent that you understand the outcomes an individual or team expects, you will begin to understand their behavior. To the extent that you are able to change the outcomes they expect, you will be able to change their behavior - given the person or team has the confidence they can do so. This leads us to the second concept, self-efficacy.
A second step to maintaining goal commitment is to increase the person’s self-efficacy (Bandura, 1997; 2001). Self-efficacy is the conviction that one can mobilize one’s resources to attain a specific performance level. “I can cause . . ., I can bring about . . . I can make happen. . . .” Self-efficacy is different from self-esteem in that the latter refers to judgments of self worth: How much does Pat like Pat? Further, self-esteem is a general trait where as self-efficacy is task specific. The two are not necessarily directly related.
Pat may have low self-esteem due to a variety of events that have occurred in Pat’s past. Pat has said and done things that are deeply regretted. For these reasons no one dislikes Pat today more than Pat. Nevertheless, Pat believes (high self-efficacy) that there is no one who is as effective in bringing in new business to the firm. Conversely, Pat may love Pat, yet she may have low self-efficacy in the ability to make a persuasive presentation to a potential client. Furthermore, because self-efficacy is task specific, an individual may have high self-efficacy on ability to work effectively with staff, low self-efficacy on working effectively with clients, and moderate self-efficacy on ability to work effectively within the firm.
People who have problems with self-esteem should be referred to a clinical psychologist. People who have low self-efficacy for attaining a specific, high goal can be coached by you in the workplace.
Bandura (2001) has shown that it is not just our ability that holds us back or propels us forward, it is also our perception of our ability. People with low self-efficacy look for tangible evidence to abandon a goal. A failure is confirmation that it is useless to persist in goal attainment. Conversely, people with high self-efficacy commit to high goals. They view obstacles and setbacks to goal attainment as challenges to overcome, as sources of excitement to be savored.
A possible indicator of low self-efficacy is self-denigration of one’s ability. Statements such as “I can’t deal with a personal computer” may indicate low self-efficacy.
High self-efficacy can be induced in the workplace in at least three ways, enactive mastery, modeling, and persuasion from a significant other. Enactive mastery involves sequencing a task in such a way that all but guarantees early successes for an individual. For example, to increase confidence in the use of a laptop, the following steps should be followed: (a) open/close, (b) on/off, (c) keyboard skills, (d) save. Early successes through “small wins” build confidence that “I can do this, my goal is indeed attainable.”
An effective coach does not abandon an employee during the early stages of learning to attain a goal. To leave the employee to master keyboard skills before teaching the process of “save” is to provide the employee with a reason for abandoning the laptop in favor of pen and paper. All that was typed is lost forever when the laptop is turned off in the absence of knowledge of the necessity to “save.”
The concepts of outcome expectancy and self-efficacy are often applied together. If the person hates the traditional “snail” mail system, show how hitting a key on the computer will send material any place in the world in seconds. In short, enable the person to see the relationship between mastery of the laptop and the desired outcome the person can expect. Then give the person confidence to do so through the sequencing of the tasks.
A second way to increase self-efficacy regarding goal attainment is through the use of models. The job of coach is to find people with whom the goal setter identifies, who have either mastered the task or are in the process of doing so. Note that the word identifies is italicized. Directing a manager who is struggling in the development of staff to another manager who has the “magic touch” with staff may not increase self-efficacy. It may even backfire as a coaching technique if this is all that is done. The person who is struggling may give up after concluding that “I will never acquire that ‘magic touch’.” Directing this manager to visit an additional colleague who has struggled recently in the past, and has subsequently improved the performance of staff, is more likely to increase the belief that “if she can, so can I.”
For the same reason, visiting a benchmark company can sometimes be a demotivating experience. The idea underlying benchmarking is to minimize reinventing the wheel on the part of people in other organizations. Through benchmarking, the acquisition of knowledge is accelerated. But, the downside of benchmarking is that visitors can leave full of admiration for what they have witnessed, and demoralized because they are convinced that they do not have the ability to model it: “Their management system is different from ours. Their union contract is nothing like ours. There is no way that we can be like them.” To increase their self-efficacy you must find an organization, in addition to the one that will be used as a benchmark, with whom employees can identify - an organization that has previously done poorly but has significantly improved its performance relative to that benchmark, or is in the process of doing so. Finding and visiting this additional organization increases the belief that “if they can, so can we.”
The American Pulpwood Association found that supervisory presence and support is also a key to goal commitment and productivity (Ronan, Latham, and Kinne, 1973). When the goal is assigned by a supportive authority figure, goal commitment and performance are high (Latham and Saari, 1979a). These findings are supported by a meta-analysis that showed a 56% average gain in productivity when management commitment to a MBO program is high versus a 6% increase when their commitment is low (Rodgers and Hunter, 1991). Thus, it is not surprising that Bandura (see Chapter 10) found that a third way of increasing self-efficacy is through persuasion from a significant other. People tend to behave in accordance with the expectations of those people who are significant to them. Assigned goals themselves usually lead to high goal commitment because listening to the assignment without objection is in itself a form of consent (Salancik, 1977). Assigning the goal implies that the recipient is capable of attaining it, which in turn increases the person’s self-efficacy regarding the task.
Bandura, a past president of the American Psychological Association, and a past honorary president of the Canadian Psychological Association, addressed a classroom of executives as follows:We know that intelligence is fixed. You either have it or you don’t. We are going to put you through a simulation consisting of tasks that you typically confront as CEOs. I know you will find these tasks frustrating and seemingly impossible.
In an adjoining room, he addressed the other half of the class of executives as follows:We know that intelligence is not fixed. Intelligence is the ability to apply what you have learned on previous tasks to present ones. We are going to put you through a simulation consisting of tasks that you typically confront as CEOs. I know that you will find these tasks challenging and fun.
Several hours later he pushed back the dividing wall. The people in the second group were laughing among themselves as to how similar the simulation was to their daily work lives, and how much they had learned from their experiences that afternoon. The people in the first group were truly angry and frustrated. They demanded to be allowed to go through the same simulation as the second group before their four weeks of executive education at Stanford came to a close. The simulation that they had gone through, they claimed, was not similar at all to what they encountered on their jobs, and hence was a waste of their time.
In short, both groups behaved in accordance with Bandura’s expectations of them, despite the fact that the simulation was identical for both groups. In less than a minute, Bandura’s expectations of one group of executives ruined their afternoon and for the other group he had the opposite effect.
A coach may or may not be a significant other for the person who is being coached. Thus a role of you as a coach is to determine the identity of the person’s significant other, and have that individual or individuals communicate, if true, why they believe the person can attain a specific high goal.
The most powerful significant other is one’s self. Verbal self-guidance (VSG) or functional self-talk can increase or debilitate self-confidence in goal attainment. We are often our worst enemy. Millman and Latham (2001) trained displaced managers to systematically monitor their self-talk to exclude negative comments and increase positive ones with respect to job attainment. Within nine months, 48% of the people who were trained obtained a job that paid ±$10,000 of their previous job; only one person of eight in the control group was able to do so. The self-efficacy of the participants in the group who were trained in functional self-talk was significantly higher than those in the control group. Similar results have been obtained for Aboriginals in Canada (Latham and Budworth, 2006). Training in VSG also turned highly competitive MBA students into team players (Latham and Brown, 2006).
The order in which these two steps, outcome expectancies and self-efficacy, should be implemented varies by individual. If outcome expectancies are already high, this step may be skipped. Focus immediately on ways of increasing self-efficacy if the person lacks confidence that the goal is attainable.
Provide resources needed to attain the goal
Goals are unlikely to be attained if situational constraints blocking their attainment are not removed. Thus the organization needs to ensure that the time, money, people, and equipment necessary for goal attainment exist. Most importantly the measurement system must not only allow accurate tracking of goal progress, it must be aligned with and be supportive of goal attainment.
For example, a newly hired professor may set a goal to receive a mean score of 5 or higher on a 7-point scale of teaching effectiveness rated by students. If the measurement system for promotion and tenure focuses primarily on publications in mainstream academic journals, and resources are provided primarily for conducting research, commitment to this teaching goal may quickly wane.
Arguably, among the most important resources necessary for accruing the positive benefits of goal setting is the employee’s ability. Organizations must provide the necessary training to give people the knowledge and skill to attain the goal. This is because the relation of goal difficulty to performance is curvilinear. Performance levels off after the limit of ability has been reached (Locke, Fredrick, Buckner, and Bobko, 1984).
Learning vs performance goals
Consistent with the above findings regarding an individual’s ability are studies by Earley, Connolly, and Ekegren (1989) as well as Kanfer and Ackerman (1989). They found that when people lack the requisite knowledge to master a task, because they are in the early stages of learning, urging them to do their best results in higher performance than setting a specific difficult goal. The reasons are at least three-fold (Latham, Seijts, and Crim, 2008). First, such tasks are complex for people. Thus the direct goal mechanisms of effort, persistence, and choice are no longer sufficient to ensure high performance. This is because people have yet to learn the correct strategy for performing effectively. Second, such tasks require primarily learning rather than motivation. People have no problem-solving processes for these tasks to draw upon. Third, people with specific high goals feel pressure to perform well immediately. As a result, they focus more on their desire to get results than on learning the correct way of performing the task. In short, tasks that are straightforward as well as those that are complex for an individual require attentional resources, but the resource demands of the latter tasks are greater than those of the former (Kanfer, 1990). Where tasks fall within the problem-solving abilities of people, as in cases where they have had experience performing the tasks effectively, specific difficult performance goals readily lead to the development and execution of task-specific strategies. Truck drivers at Weyerhaeuser found ways to increase truck loads (Latham and Baldes, 1975) and to decrease truck turnaround time (Latham and Saari, 1982) after being assigned a specific difficult goal. They drew upon the knowledge they already possessed to attain the performance goal.
This was not the case in a study by Winters and Latham (1996) using a new (for them) complex class scheduling task developed by Earley (1985). Winters and Latham found a deleterious effect of a specific, difficult goal for performance because the wrong type of goal was set. When a high learning goal was set in terms of discovering a specific number of ways to solve the task, performance was significantly higher than it was when people were urged to do their best or had set a performance outcome goal. This is because a learning goal requires people to focus on understanding the task that is required of them and developing a plan for performing it correctly. As Oppenheimer noted during the development of the atomic bomb, determining how to get to one’s destination is often more important than the critical target. Research on goal setting theory shows that high performance is not always the result of high effort or persistence, but rather high cognitive understanding of the task and strategy or plan necessary to complete it (Seijts and Latham, 2005). A learning goal is especially beneficial for people who score low on cognitive ability (Latham et al., 2008). As John D. Rockefeller said years ago, a goal of good management is to show average people how to do the work of superior people. A learning goal can raise the performance of people who score lower on cognitive ability to that of those who score higher on cognitive intelligence.
Environmental uncertainty
Among the biggest impediments to goal setting is environmental uncertainty (Locke and Latham, 1990). This is because the information required to set learning or outcome goals may be unavailable. And even when such information is available, it may become obsolete due to rapid changes in the environment. Thus as uncertainty increases, it becomes increasingly difficult to set and commit to a long-term goal.
In a simulation of such a situation, Latham and Seijts (1999) replicated the findings of Earley, Wojnaroski, and Prest (1987) and Kanfer and Ackerman (1989) using a business game where high school students were paid on a piece-rate basis to make toys, and the dollar amounts paid for the toys changed continuously without warning. Setting a specific high performance goal resulted in profits that were significantly worse than urging the students to do their best. But when proximal performance goals were set in addition to the distal goal, profit was significantly higher than in the other two conditions. This is because in highly dynamic situations, it is important to actively search for feedback and react quickly to it (Frese and Zapf, 1994). In addition, Dorner (1991) has found that performance errors on a dynamic task are often due to deficient decomposition of a goal into proximal goals. Proximal goals can increase what Keith and Frese (2005) call error management. Errors provide information to employees as to whether their picture of reality is congruent with goal attainment. There is an increase in informative feedback when proximal or sub-goals are set relative to setting a distal goal only.
In addition to being informative, the setting of proximal goals can also be motivational relative to a distal goal that is far into the future. Moreover, the attainment of proximal goals can increase commitment, through enactive mastery, to attain the distal goal (Seijts and Latham, 2005).
Stretch goals
Don’t expect people to willingly stretch themselves by committing to a very high goal if the outcome they expect is criticism for making an error. One or more errors are bound to occur in the active pursuit of a time-sensitive difficult goal. On tasks that are complex for people, Frese’s research (Frese, 2005; Keith and Frese, 2005) shows that performance actually increases if errors are encouraged (“the more errors you initially make, the more you learn”).
USE THE HIGH PERFORMANCE CYCLE
The usefulness of goal setting theory for everyday applications in work settings is shown in Figure 9.2. The high performance cycle (Locke and Latham, 1990; Latham et al., 2002) or HPC’s usefulness for motivating employees in the public sector was demonstrated by Selden and Brewer (2000). It is a diagnostic tool or framework for understanding why employees are or are not motivated. For example:FIGURE 9.2 The high performance cycle
1. Demandsa. Do people have specific high goals?
b. Are the tasks “drudgery” or growth facilitating?
c. Do people have the confidence so that they can attain the goals set (self-efficacy)?
2. Moderatorsa. Have people been trained adequately? Do they have the ability to perform the tasks required of them?
b. Are they committed to goal attainment?
c. Do they receive feedback on goal progress?
d. Do they have the resources to attain the goal or are there situational constraints?
3. Rewardsa. Are they rewarded for their accomplishments?(i) Intrinsically?
(ii) Extrinsically?
b. Are they satisfied with their rewards?
4. Attitudesa. Are they committed to their organization’s effectiveness?
b. Are they willing to accept future challenges?
For what should goals be set?
As a theory of motivation, a goal refers to a desired outcome in terms of level of performance to be attained on a task. Goal content refers to the object or result that is sought after (Locke and Latham, 1990). Thus performance goals should be set for outcomes that are critical or valued by the individual or the organization in which the person is employed. An employee may have a career goal, a job goal, a financial goal, as well as psychological goals including job satisfaction and self-efficacy. A learning goal should be set for discovering the processes and strategies for reaching a desired outcome when the person lacks the knowledge to do so. Behavioral goals, identified through a job analysis, are more effective than a learning goal when the critical behaviors are known (Brown and Latham, 2002). To set a learning goal in this instance is to encourage paralysis through analysis. Behavioral goals are especially appropriate for job satisfaction and self-efficacy.
Because a goal is the object or aim of an action, the completion of a task can be a goal. As noted by Locke and Latham (1990), in most goal setting studies the term goal refers to attaining a specific standard of proficiency on a given task within a specific timeframe. This has resulted in practitioners of goal setting creating the acronym SMART, namely, goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and have a timeframe (Mealiea and Latham, 1996). The framing of a goal is especially important for implementation with regard to the stress that it can cause. Frame the goal positively, for example in terms of something a person can learn to perform well. Don’t frame it negatively, as something a person may have difficulty attaining. A negatively framed goal (“Try not to miss answering 3 of these 15 anagrams”) leads to worse performance than a positively framed one (“Try to make words from 12 or more of the 15 anagrams”; Drach-Zahavy and Erez, 2002; Roney, Griggs, and Shanks, 2003).
Who should set the goals?
A seminal study at the General Electric Company (Meyer, Kay, and French, 1965) revealed that it is not so important who sets the goal as it is that a specific challenging goal in fact be set. However, subsequent laboratory and field experiments revealed contradictory findings. Erez and her colleagues (e.g. Erez, 1986; Erez and Arad, 1986; Erez, Earley, and Hulin, 1985) found that goal commitment and subsequent performance are higher when employees participate in the setting of the goal than was the case when the goals were assigned. A series of 11 studies by Latham and his colleagues (e.g. Latham and Saari, 1979a, b; Latham and Steele, 1983) found that when goal difficulty is held constant, goal commitment and performance are the same regardless of whether the goal is assigned or set participatively.
In what is rare if not unique in science, the two antagonists, Erez and Latham, did a series of collaborative studies, with Locke as a mediator, to discover the basis for their conflicting findings (Latham, Erez, and Locke, 1988). They found that their methodology was highly similar in the way in which the goals were set participatively, yet highly different in the way in which the goals were assigned. In what would be expected, based on Greenberg’s organizational justice principles (see Chapter 14, this volume), when the assigned goal was given tersely and without any rationale, it had a negative effect on performance relative to participatively set goals. When an assigned goal from an authority figure included a logic or rationale, it had the same positive effect on goal commitment and performance as did a participatively set goal. (For an overall summary of the research on the effects of participation, see Chapter 24, this volume.)
Subsequent research by Latham, Winters, and Locke (1994) revealed that Erez had been correct in arguing the benefit of participation in goal setting, but for the wrong reason. The benefit is primarily cognitive rather than motivational. Employee participation in decision making has a positive effect on performance to the extent that it increases self-efficacy and the discovery of task relevant strategies. When this does not occur, when these two variables are partialed out, participation in decision making has a negligible effect on performance.
Training self-regulation
The management of oneself lies at the core of goal setting theory. Setting a goal and taking action to attain it is a volitional process. Holding goal difficulty constant, self-set goals are as effective in increasing performance as are goals that are assigned or set participatively (Locke and Latham, 1990). This finding is the basis for training people skills in self-management.
The University of Washington
The University of Washington trained their maintenance employees (carpenters, mechanics, electricians) in self-regulation to increase their job attendance (Frayne and Latham, 1987). The training took place in a group setting one hour a week for eight weeks. In the first session, the principles of goal setting were explained to the trainees. In Session 2, the trainees generated reasons for their low job attendance. The third session focused on the value of setting behavioral and outcome (days present) goals for attendance. In the fourth session, the importance of self-monitoring one’s behavior was discussed. Specifically, the trainees were taught to use charts and diaries to record (a) their own attendance, (b) the reasons for missing one or more days of the week, and (c) the steps that were followed to subsequently return to work. The trainees identified rewards and punishers in the fifth session that they would self-administer contingent upon their attendance. In the sixth session the trainees wrote a behavioral contract with themselves. The contract specified writing the goal(s) to be attained, the timeframe for attaining the goal(s), the outcomes of attaining or failing to attain the goal(s), and the task strategies necessary for attaining the goal(s). The seventh session emphasized maintenance. That is, discussion focused on issues that might result in a relapse in absenteeism, planning for such situations should they occur, and developing strategies for dealing with such situations. During the final week of training, the trainer reviewed each technique presented in the program, answered questions from the trainees regarding these skills, and clarified expectations for self-management.
Observe that the training took explicit account of goal setting moderators and subprinciples discussed earlier in this chapter. Goal commitment was the focus of Sessions 5 and 6, where rewards and punishers were selected, and a behavioral contract was written. Feedback through self-monitoring was emphasized in Session 4. The complexity of the task and the situational constraints were the focus of Session 2 where employees specified in writing the behavior that they believed would enable them to get to work, and Session 7 where they outlined possibilities for a relapse and what could be done to overcome such issues.
Participatory group discussions occurred throughout the eight weeks of training. The main benefit of participation, as noted earlier, is cognitive; thus the training focused the attention of each person in the group on identifying effective strategies for overcoming obstacles to attaining the goal. In this way, self-efficacy was increased. Self-efficacy correlated significantly in the study with subsequent job attendance. Three months later employee attendance was significantly higher in the training than in the control group.
The University of Washington conducted a six-month and a nine-month follow-up study to determine the long-term effects of this training. Employees who had been trained in self-management continued to have higher job attendance than those in the control group. Moreover, when the people in the control group were subsequently given the same training in self-management, but by a different trainer, they too showed the same positive improvement in their self-efficacy with regard to coping with obstacles perceived by them as preventing them from coming to work. Moreover, their job attendance increased to the same level as that which the original training group had achieved three months after it had been trained (Latham and Frayne, 1989).
When are goals ineffective? The answer to this question is given throughout this chapter. For example, both the American Pulpwood Association and Weyerhaeuser found that when the goal is abstract such as urging loggers to do their best, productivity is lower than setting a specific difficult goal (Latham and Kinne, 1974; Latham and Yukl, 1975). They also found that when goals are set and supervisory supportiveness is lacking, turnover is high, people quit (Ronan, Latham, and Kinne, 1973). When specific challenging performance goals were set before people have acquired knowledge and skill to perform the task, the performance of Air Force cadets dropped (Kanfer and Ackerman, 1989). In short, goals do not work when the principles we have discussed are not applied.
A limitation of theories of consciously set goals is that they fail to take advantage of the subconscious, a storehouse of knowledge, and values beyond that which is found in awareness at any given point in time. This is a limitation because unlike the conscious mind, the subconscious has an enormous storage capacity. This storage capacity frees the conscious mind to focus on new facts and make new integrations. Priming may be a method for setting subconscious goals.
People were primed to diet through exposure to a room filled with exercise and dieting magazines. People in the control group entered a room filled with magazines about politics and economics. Participants in the primed condition subsequently chose an apple over a candy bar. They had no awareness of why they made that decision (Fishbach, Friedman, and Kruglanski, 2003). Employees in a call center were given written instructions over a backdrop photograph of a woman winning a race. They subsequently raised significantly more dollars than did employees whose instructions were written on an otherwise blank sheet of paper (Shantz and Latham, 2009).
CONCLUSION
Specific challenging goals are motivational regardless of whether they are self-set, set participatively, or assigned. If the person has the knowledge and skill necessary to perform the task, performance goals should be set. If the requisite knowledge or skill is lacking, learning goals should be set. If the moderators and subprinciples described in this chapter are taken into account by practitioners of goal setting, the probability that performance and satisfaction will increase is above .90 (Locke and Latham, 1990). No other theory of motivation has been found to be as consistently effective in the workplace as goal setting.
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Group exercise - goal setting
Randomly divide people into three groups. Tell one group (in writing in all cases), so no person will know the others’ goals, to think of 14 ways to improve their business (UG or MBA) program or their business unit’s effectiveness in two minutes. (Give all subjects actually three minutes to show the effects of persistence of the hard goal: the hard goal group will still be working.) Give a second group the goal of 4 and tell the third group to do their best. Calculate the mean score of each group at the end. (It is best to use lined sheets numbered 1 to 14 or 1 to 4) for the goal groups and a blank sheet for the do best group. (This helps prevent people from setting their own personal goals.)
Group exercise - subconscious priming
Give one group a photo of a woman winning a race and give the other group a blank sheet of paper. Ask both groups to come up with as many uses for a coat hanger as they can in two minutes. Count the scores of the two groups. This exercise is designed to measure the effects of subconscious priming.