Page 233 - Psychological Management of Individual Performance

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ABILITY AND TASK COMPLEXITY

Because goal setting is a motivational theory, ability was taken as a given in most studies
conducted prior to 1990. The tasks that were used in those studies were usually ones that
the person already had the requisite knowledge and skill to perform well. This was done
to minimize confounding of learning with motivation. The difficulty for practitioners
is that tasks in most field settings are inherently confounded in that both learning and
motivation are required to excel on the job. This can be true for even easy tasks where
there are multiple paths to accomplishment (Audia et al., 1996).
Mathieu and Button (1992) found that past performance, which is evidence of one’s
ability, influences the setting of future self-goals. Boyce and Wayda (1994) found that on
tasks where the requisite skills to perform it have yet to be acquired, assigned goals lead
to higher performance than self-set goals. As both Kiesler (1971) and Salancik (1977)
noted years ago, the act of goal assignment, especially when the goal is high, increases
self-efficacy in that it signals the belief by one’s supervisor that the person has the ability
to attain it.
Goals sometimes can be detrimental if individuals do not have the skill or knowledge
required to attain them. In a simulation of air traffic controllers involving airforce cadets,
Kanfer (Kanfer & Ackerman, 1989; Kanfer, 1990) found that in the absence of requisite
ability, setting a specific difficult performance outcome goal, as had been done in the
literally hundreds of previous goal-setting studies, led to a significant decrease rather
than an increase in performance relative to those participants who were urged to do
their best. This is because tasks that are complex for an individual require attentional
resources for learning what is required to perform well. Individuals who are motivated to
do well before they have acquired the ability to do so fail to quickly master the requisite
knowledge and hence perform poorly.
Polzer and Neale (1995), in a simulated job interview, likewise found that a specific
difficult outcome goal had a detrimental effect on negotiations. They attributed this
finding to a failure on the part of the participants to integrate new information.
Elliott and Dweck (1986) labeled the performance benefit of “urging” children to
increase their ability or master a new task, rather than attaining a specific performance
outcome, a learning goal. Bouffard, Boisvet, Vezeau and Larouche (1995) found that
on tasks, such as self-regulation, that are complex, a learning goal orientation increased
performance as it led to the discovery of effective self-regulating strategies.
Winters and Latham (1996) found that setting a specific high learning goal, such
as discover X ways to master this issue, leads to higher performance on a task that is
complex for people than urging them to do their best; urging people to do their best
on such tasks, consistent with the findings of both Dweck and Kanfer, leads to higher
performance than setting a specific difficult performance outcome goal.
Newman (1998) found that assigned learning goals in terms of identifying problem-
solving strategies led to fewer requests for assistance than was the case where stu-
dents had performance outcome goals in terms of academic grades. VandeWalle and
Cummings (1997) found that a primary benefit of learning goals is that they tend to
induce feedback-seeking behavior. Greene and Miller (1996) found that people with
a learning goal orientation developed a strategy portfolio so that they did not have to
develop additional strategies whenever they encountered a task that was complex for
them.