HERCORE COLLEGE

RIVERSIDE CAMPUS
ROXAS AVENUE, ROXAS CITY
COLLEGE OF EDUCATION

14 Research Findings
A research was made by Locke (2017) under the article “Motivation Through Conscious Goal Setting.” The research has the
following findings:

1. The more difficult the goal, the greater the achievement.

The linear function assumes, however, that the individual is committed to the goal and possesses the requisite ability and knowledge to
achieve it. Without these, performance does drop at high goal levels.

2. The more specific or explicit the goal, the more precisely performance is regulated.
High goal specificity is achieved mainly through quantification (e.g., increase sales by 10%) or enumeration (e.g., a list of tasks to be
accomplished). Thus, it reduces variance in performance. This is not to say that specificity is always desirable (it may not be in some creative
innovation situations), but only it has certain effects.

3. Goals that are both specific and difficult lead to highest performance

Especially relevant here are the many studies that compared the effect of specific hard goals such as “do your best.” People do NOT actually
do their best when they try to do their best because, as a vague goal, it is compatible with many different outcomes, including those lower than
one’s best. The aspect of intensity that has been most studied in goal setting research is that goal commitment—the degree to which the person is
genuinely attached to and determined to reach the goals.

4. Commitment to goals is most critical when goals are specific and difficult.

When goals are easy or vague, it is not hard be committed to it because it does not require much dedication to reach easy goals, and vague
goals can be easily redefined to accommodate low performance. However, when goals are specific and hard, the higher the commitment is being
required, which results to better performance.
5. High commitment to goals is attained when:

a. The individual is convinced that the goal is important;

b. The individual is convinced that the goal is attainable (or that, at least, progress can be made toward it).

These are the same factors that influence goal choice. There are many ways to convince a person that a goal is important;

 In most laboratory settings, it is quite sufficient to simply ask for compliance after providing a plausible rationale for the study.
 In work situations, the supervisor or leader can use legitimate authority to get initial commitment.

Financial incentives may facilitate commitment and performance, except when rewards are offered for attaining impossible goals. Here,
performance actually drops.

Participation by subordinates in setting goals (i.e., joint goal setting by supervisor and subordinate) leads to higher commitment than curtly
telling people what to do with no explanation, but it does not lead to (practically significant) higher commitment than providing a convincing
rationale for an assigned goal.

Self-set goals can be highly effective in gaining commitment, although they may not always be set as high as another person would assign.

Commitment can be enhanced by effective leadership. Relevant leadership techniques include:

 Providing and communicating as inspiring vision;

 acting as role model for the employees;
 expecting outstanding performance;
 promoting employees who embrace the vision and dismissing those who reject it;
 delegating responsibility (“ownership”) for key tasks;
 goal setting itself can be delegated for capable, responsible employees;
 expressing (genuine) confidence in employee capabilities;
 enhancing capabilities through training; and
 asking for commitment in public.

Self-efficacy refers to task-specific confidence and is a key component of Bandura’s (1986) social cognitive theory. Bandura showed
that self-efficacy can be raised by enactive mastery, persuasion, and role modeling – all referred to above. In organizational settings, enactive
 mastery can be assured by providing people with needed experience and training and also by selecting people based on their skills and abilities.
Persuasion may include not only verbal expression of confidence but also giving people information regarding what task strategies to use. The
effectiveness of role modeling depends on the attributes of the model on the person observing the model.

6. In addition to having a direct effect on performance, self-efficacy influences:

a. the difficulty level of the goal chosen or accepted;
b. commitment to goals;
c. the response to negative feedback or failure; and
d. the choice of task strategies.

People with high self-efficacy are more likely to set high goals or to accept difficult, assigned goals, commit themselves to difficult
goals, to respond with renewed efforts to setbacks, and to discover successful task strategies. Thus, the effects of self-efficacy on performance
are both direct and indirect (through various goal processes). Additionally, goal choice and commitment can be influenced through role
modeling.
Feedback. For people to pursue goals effectively, they need some means of checking or tracking their progress toward their goal.
Sometimes this is self-evident to perception, as when a person walks down a road toward a distant but visible town. In such cases, deviations
from the path to the goal are easily seen and corrected. However, take note that this is in contrast with a sales goal, whose attainment requires
scores of sales over a period of many months. Here, some formal means of keeping score is needed so that people can get a clear indication if
they are moving fast enough and in the right direction.

7. Goal setting is most effective when there is feedback that shows progress in relation to the goal.

When provided with feedback on their own performance or that of others, people often spontaneously set goals to improve their previous
best or beat the performance of others simply as a way of challenging themselves, but this is not inevitable. The goal set may be higher or lower
than the performance level previously achieved. The effect of performance feedback (knowledge of score) depends on the goals set in response
to it.

8. Goal setting (along with self-efficacy) mediates the effect of knowledge of past performance on subsequent performance.

When people receive negative performance feedback, they are typically unhappy and may also experience doubts about their ability. Those
who can sustain their self-efficacy under such pressure tend to maintain or even raise their subsequent goals, retain their commitment, intensify their
search for better strategies, and thereby improve their subsequent performance. Those who lose confidence will tend to lower their goals, decrease
 their efforts, and lessen the intensity and effectiveness of their strategy search. According to Bandura, changes in self-efficacy after experiencing
failure may be affected by the types of causal affirmative statements people make.

9. Goals affect performance by affecting the direction of action, the degree of effort exerted, and the persistence of action over
time.

The directive aspect is fairly obvious. A person who has a goal to maximize quality of performance will focus more attention and action
on quality of performance will focus more attention and action on quality than on, for example, quantity or speed. When there is conflict
between two or more goals, performance with respect to each goal may be undermined. Effort is roughly proportional to the judge difficulty of
the goal-which is why difficult goals ordinarily lead to higher performance than easy goals. Persistence refers to effort extended over time.
Harder goals typically lead to more persistence than easy goals, because, given the commitment, they take longer to reach and may require
overcoming more obstacles.
These mechanisms operate almost automatically, or at least routinely once a goal is committed to, because most people have learned
(by about the age of 6) that if they want to achieve something they have to: pay attention to it to the exclusion of other things, exert the needed
effort, and persist until it is achieved.
There is another, more indirect goal mechanism-that of task strategies or plan. Most goals require the application of task-specific procedures
in additional to attention and effort if they are to be attained. For example, a student who wants to get an A in psychology course needs to know
how to study in general, hoe to study psychology in particular, how to identify what is needed for is needed for an A in this course and how to
implement this knowledge. There are several things we have learned about the relationship of goals and plans.

10. Goals stimulate planning in general. Often, the planning quality is higher than that which occurs without goals. When people
possess task or goal-relevant plans as a result of experience or training, they activate them automatically when confronted with a performance
goal. Newly learned plans or strategies are most likely to be utilized under the stimulus of a specific, difficult goal.

People recognized that goals require plans and seek either to use what they already know or to make new plans when they want to reach goals.
Sometimes such plans are quite pedestrian. For example, to attain difficult quantity goals, people may simply sacrifice quality—a common trade-
off which everyone is familiar with. When people are given training in a new strategy, they do not always use it consistently unless they must in
order to attain goals that cannot otherwise be attained. When task are complex, a number of new issues arise. Direct goal mechanisms are less
adequate than in the case of simple tasks for attaining the goal. (Compare, for example, the efficacy of effort alone in leading to high performance
when doing push-ups versus playing chess.) The path to the goal is less clear, and there may be no relevant prior experience or training which
they can fall back on. In such cases, people are forced to discover new strategies; sometimes they do this poorly especially if the goals are specific
and difficult. The reason appears to be that under this type of pressure, tunnel vision inhibits effective search procedures.
11. When people strive for goals on complex tasks, they are least effective in discovering suitable task strategies if:

a. they have no prior experience or training on the tasks;

b. there is high pressure to perform well; and
c. there is high time pressure ( to perform well immediately).

Goals as mediators. Goals , along with self-efficacy, might mediate the effect =s of values and personality on performance. There is a firm support
for goals and self- efficacy as mediators of feedback. Feedback is most effective in motivating improved performance when it is used to set goals.
Feedback alone is just information. To act based on information, people need to know or decide what it means-that is, what significance it has. In
goal-setting context, this means knowing what is good or desirable score is from a bad or undesirable score.
If no such judgment is made, the feedback will probably be ignored. Similarly, participation seems to motivate performance to the extent that it
leads to higher goals, higher self – efficacy, or higher commitment. More recent studies have shown evidence for goals or goals plus self – efficacy
as a mediator of personality and charismatic leadership. In other words, these variables affect performance through their effects on goals and self –
efficacy.

12. Goals (including goal commitment), in combination with self – efficacy, mediate or partially mediate the effects of several
personality traits and incentives on performance.
The logic behind this model is that goal and self – efficacy are the immediate regulators of much human action, and these goals and self –
efficacy, therefore, reflects the individual’s assessment of the value of incentives and of the applicability of values and traits to specific situations.