Set Your Goals, Achieve Success - [website] Published: 3rd of May 2011 by: (c) Staff Training Reporter
Are you a goal setter? Or in other words, do you create targets that you work towards at the office?
Or does the company you work for set goals for you to achieve?
Goal setting is, or at least it should be, a huge part of what makes a company the most productive it can possibly be, and according to researchers groups and individuals who work towards targets perform “one standard deviation higher” than those who do not.
But these findings pose the question: How high should we be setting the bar in order to get the best results from ourselves or from our staff?
Researchers found that employees who were set easily attainable goals were either only very slightly motivated or not at all, while goals that were obviously out-of-reach had the same effect.
Moderately aggressive goals, on the other hand, were found to be the best motivators and more often than not led to increased production from workers.
Setting a goal to work towards, according to the researchers, changes the behaviours of the participants and forces new patterns to emerge. They provide employees with focus, giving a clear understanding of what the individual or group is expected to do, by when and where.
But it was also discovered that individuals accepted, or were less accepting of goals for a number of different reasons.
Research by Earley and Shalley in the early 90s found that “when an individual is presented with a goal, he or she may initially opt to accept, reject, or evaluate it further, and that when a goal is accepted, it becomes a personal goal that the person is willing to work towards.”
Goals that employees deem to be fair are the most likely to be accepted, they said.
“Organizational norms or a sense of duty to others may be extremely persuasive in acceptance of the goal; if the goals are determined in what is perceived to be a fair manner, they are more likely to be accepted; individuals who self-set goals will not be as accepting of goals which are assigned.”
This means that while goal setting is a fundamental part of productivity and efficiency, the way in which goals are determined must ensure they are neither unobtainable nor too easy to achieve, and a certain amount of resistance to goals may also be expected.
