Page 220 - Psychological Management of Individual Performance

204 the high performance cycle: standing the test of time
Moderators
Ability
Commitment
Feedback Rewards
Task complexity Non-contingent
Situational constraints rewards

Demands
Challenge, high
goals on Performance Contingent
meaningful, (hard or soft Rewards Satisfaction
growth-facilitating measures) (internal,
tasks or series of external)
tasks plus high
self-efficacy

Mediators
Direction Consequences
Effort Commitment to
Persistence organization and
Task-specific
willingness to
strategies accept future
challenges

FIGURE 10.1 The high performance cycle

Because of the theoretical and practical importance of the HPC for the workforce in
this new millennium, the literature from 1990 through the spring of 2000 was reviewed to
see the extent to which the HPC has withstood the test of time. An electronic search was
conductedthroughPsycInfoandProquestusingkeywordsfromtheHPC.Approximately
105 empirical studies and literature reviews relevant to the HPC were located, and are
summarized in Table 10.1.

DEMANDS INFLUENCE PERFORMANCE

GOALS

A goal is the object or aim of an action. In a study involving the performance appraisal
of unionized employees, Brown and Latham (2000a) found that those who set specific,
difficult goals for a subsequent evaluation of their behavior on behavioral observation
scales had significantly higher evaluations than those who were urged to do their best.
In a study of chronic musculoskeletal pain patients, Tan et al. (1997) discovered that
the return to work goal was the single best predictor of a return to work. The positive
effect of specific, high goals on behavior has also been obtained in the field of neuro-
rehabilitation involving five studies of brain-damaged patients (Gauggel, 1999). No
clinical or neuropsychological variable (e.g., time since onset of illness) was found to
have a moderating influence. An interesting finding was that assigned goals led to better