Page 232 - Psychological Management of Individual Performance

216 the high performance cycle: standing the test of time
jointly increased the performance of athletes on an endurance task relative to those
with no goals. With regard to groups, Weldon and her colleagues (Weingart & Weldon,
1991; Weldon, Jehn, & Pradhan, 1991) found that effort, persistence, goal commitment,
performance monitoring, and the identification of strategies to attain the group’s goal
mediated the effect of the goal–performance relationship.
Gellatly and Meyer (1992) found that attention, effort, and persistence are associated
with arousal of the sympathetic nervous system, specifically changes in heart rate. Heart
rate mediated the goal difficulty–performance relationship. Duncan (1995) found that ac-
tion is represented by a hierarchy of goals and subgoals activated in the prefrontal cortex.

TASK-SPECIFIC STRATEGIES
Chesney and Locke (1991) found that, on a complex task, strategy had a stronger effect
on performance than did the goal. This was because having the requisite knowledge is
especially critical on such tasks. Similarly, Earley, Lee, and Hanson (1990) found that
people with a high goal-setting composite (specific/difficult) were more likely to develop
an effective work strategy whereas strategy development was lacking among those with
a low goal composite.
On a task involving the scheduling of classes, Latham, Winters, and Locke (1994)
found that participation in goal setting was completely mediated by task strategy and
self-efficacy. Subsequent research revealed that the identification of strategies mediated
the relationship between self-efficacy and performance (Seijts & Latham, 2001). Support
continues to be found in the literature for the role that the HPC mediators play in
explaining performance.
Numerous studies have indicated that difficult goals for tasks that are highly complex
forapersonmaynotbeasdetrimentaltoperformanceasoncethought.Theimprovements
are lagged as a result of strategy development on ways to attain the goal (Smith, Locke, &
Barry, 1990; Earley, Shalley, & Northcraft, 1992; Audia, Kristof, Brown, & Locke, 1996).
In summary, there continues to be support for the mediators of the goal effect (direc-
tion, effort, persistence, and task strategies) identified by Locke and Latham (1990a, b).
However, the relationship is sometimes one of moderation, especially with regard to
the effect of goals and strategies. In some studies goals and strategies appear to have
independent effects. To make sense of these inconsistent findings, Locke (2000) has
provided a detailed review and analysis of the studies of task goals and knowledge. He
showed that these findings can be subsumed under a single, dynamic model. The model
shows that performance can be regulated by goals that arouse or lead to the discovery of
relevant task knowledge and also by task knowledge that is not aroused by or associated
with goals but rather other motives. The particular results observed in a given study
(mediation, moderation, independent effects) are simply a function of the specific vari-
ables that were measured.

MODERATORS

Moderator or boundary variables can enhance or attenuate the effect of demands, shown
in Figure 10.1, on the employee’s performance. These moderators include: ability, task
complexity, situational constraints, feedback, and goal commitment.