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Goal setting as a motivational process (Connect, Perform) Use your knowledge of goal-setting theory to complete the following sentence

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Goal setting as a motivational process (Connect, Perform)

Use your knowledge of goal-setting theory to complete the following sentence.

Feedback  

 refers to information people receive about how well they are doing on reaching a goal.

 

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Explanation:

Feedback gives people information on whether they are making progress toward achieving a goal. Without feedback, people can’t change their behaviors to meet a goal, which leads to low performance. Feedback that comes from the task itself (such as the feedback you get when you play a video game) is more motivating than feedback that comes from an outside source.

Identify the cause of each of the following problems.

Problem	Goal Specificity	Goal Difficulty	Goal Acceptance	Feedback
Ashami just had a meeting with Shared, a new employee. Shared said that his goal was to produce 5 articles a month, but Ashami knows that the last employee in the position was able to write 15 articles a month.
Lyle’s manager just handed him a list of goals for the year. Because Lyle had no say in setting these goals, he isn’t sure that they are the right ones for him, and as a result, he isn’t very motivated to accomplish them.

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Explanation:

Problem	Cause
Ashami just had a meeting with Shared, a new employee. Shared said that his goal was to produce 5 articles a month, but Ashami knows that the last employee in the position was able to write 15 articles a month.	Ashami is having a problem with goal difficulty. Highly ambitious but achievable goals help people stretch their abilities and provide a basis for greater feelings of accomplishment and personal effectiveness than do easier goals.
Lyle’s manager just handed him a list of goals for the year. Because Lyle had no say in setting these goals, he isn’t sure that they are the right ones for him, and as a result, he isn’t very motivated to accomplish them.	Lyle is having a problem with goal acceptance. When top leaders at a state-run aluminum plant in Venezuela implemented a comanagement initiative that asked managers and lower-level employees to work together to set budgets, determine goals, and make decisions, one employee said, “The managers and the workers are running this business together. It gives us the motivation to work hard.”

Use the following research summary and your knowledge of goal-setting theory to answer the questions that follow.

RESEARCH STUDY

According to recent research, only 35% of full-time students complete their university degrees in 4 years. Why is this? Could universities improve academic performance and completion rates simply through the use of goal setting? Dominique Morisano tested this idea in her dissertation. Morisano followed 85 students who weren’t doing very well in school for 4 months. The entire group of students was similar in many ways (GPA, demographics, native language, and academic probation standing). Half of the students (the goal group) participated in an 8-week, intensive goal-setting program, while the other half (the control group) did not. The goal-setting program helped students to set personal goals and to create detailed strategies for achieving them. Morisano found that students who received goal-setting training were less likely to withdraw from school than students in the control group. The results of Morisano’s experiment on GPA are shown next.

01233.23.02.82.62.42.22.01.8GPA MeansSemesterGoal GroupControl Group

(Source: D., M., J. B., H., J. B., P., R. O., P., & B., S. (2010). Journal of Applied Psychology. In Setting, elaborating, and reflecting on personal goals improves academic performance. (pp. 255–264, 95 (2)))

What do the results of Morisano’s study (shown on the graph) illustrate?

 

Having specific, difficult goals increases a student’s GPA.

 

Students performed better in their second semester than they did in their first semester.

Training students in goal setting leads to an increase in their GPAs.

Students with higher GPAs are more likely to set goals.

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When students created detailed strategies for achieving their goals, they were increasinggoal validity  

 .

 

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Explanation:

Morisano’s study shows that when students receive goal-setting training, their GPAs increase. This is because the training gives students the opportunity to set goals for themselves, and specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound goals increase performance more than no goals or “do your best” goals. Creating detailed strategies for goal achievement will increase goal specificity. Consider a student who has an overall goal of getting an A in a class. Strategizing about how to get the A (for example, by reading a chapter a week or by bringing candy to the professor) will create subgoals and make the original goal more specific.