Aristotle speculated that purpose can cause action; thus, Locke began researching the impact goals have on human activity.
[1] Locke and Latham (2002) have indicated three moderators that indicate goal setting success: Expanding the three from above, the level of commitment is influenced by external factors.
[6] However, when faced with complex tasks and directions that are difficult to specify, telling someone to "do their best", with a focus on learning, can sometimes lead to the discovery of better strategies whereby specific goals can then be set.
Negative feedback can be reframed and errors seen as beneficial to the learning and goal achievement process and in turn increase participant resilience.
[21] Similar to the expression "the sum of the parts can be greater than the whole", a division of a project into several, immediate, subgoals appears to take advantage of these two elements.
[22] While the literature on self-regulated learning covers a broad variety of theoretical perspectives and concepts such as control theory, self-efficacy, action regulation, and resource allocation, goal-setting is a crucial component of virtually all of these approaches as the initiator of self-regulation mechanisms such as planning, monitoring, metacognition, attention, learning strategies, persistence, time management, environmental structuring, help seeking, emotion control, motivation, effort, and self-efficacy.
[29] In business, goal setting remains a popular evidence based approach to align efforts across organizations, communicate objectives, and improve motivation as well as task performance for individuals and groups.
Also, because every member has defined expectations for their role, little room is left for inadequate, marginal effort to go unnoticed The more employees are motivated, the more they are stimulated and interested in accepting goals.
[34] Furthermore, training in goal setting has been linked to higher levels of performance among adults and children with mild to severe intellectual disability.
Beginning with struggling undergraduate students, there is some evidence that when compared to a control group, students who had set general rather than domain specific academic goals experienced the following benefits in the semester after the intervention namely, i) increased GPA, ii) a higher probability of maintaining a full course load, iii) a reduction in self reported negative affect.
In one study persistent male underperformance in tertiary education was almost entirely closed to achieve parity with females after one year of the intervention.
Similar albeit slower positive impacts in closing the ethnicity achievement gap by the second year of the same goal setting intervention were reported.
These include increased self-esteem, time and improved stress management and self-monitoring skills as well as motivating, and energizing effects.
A typical such checklist could include the following factors: Goal-setting also works effectively either or its own or as part of a package of other behavior management interventions.
[55] There is evidence that setting and reflecting on progress life goals are an effective intervention to provide both a sense of purpose and increase happiness.
Further evidence for this effect is provided by the more broader personal benefits of prosocial behavior and acts of kindness towards others rather than self care/focusing on oneself.
[57] There is evidence from randomized control trials that goal setting treatments improved executive function, attention/working memory, and learning in stroke patients.
Niven and Healy found that a subset of the population having a relatively high tendency to morally justify behavior was more likely to engage in the kind of cheating identified by Schweitzer et al.[60] Particular side effects associated with goal setting include a narrow focus that neglects non-goal areas, more unethical behavior, distorted risk preferences, damage to organizational culture, and reduced intrinsic motivation.
[63]: 180–181 Goal setting may have the drawback of inhibiting implicit learning if the required knowledge and strategic awareness are not in place: goal setting may encourage simple focus on an outcome without openness to exploration, understanding, or growth and result in lower performance than simply encouraging people to "do their best".
Such situations include when an individual becomes overly focused on accomplishing a previously-set goal that they end up underperforming on current tasks.
Of 28 observers who were focused on counting the number of passes between only the players wearing white shirts, only 6 reported noticing the woman carrying the umbrella.
[64][65] Further to the above, learning goals can be more specifically operationalized as "a desired number of strategies, processes, or procedures to be developed in order to master a task'"[71].
Individuals who view situations as threats get better results using learning goals focused on developing strategy to achieve the task.
Habits, defined as "behavioral tendencies tied to specific contexts, such as time of day, location, the presence of particular people, preceding actions, or even one's mood", habits develop through context, repetition, and reward and interact closely with goals to impact (often negatively) goal attainment.
[83] Inevitably the use of sub-conscious goal with employees to improve work performance carries with it many potential ethical issues and concerns.
[90] In workplace settings employees are often expected to achieve performance outcomes at tasks that are moderately complex and require learning new things.
Erez and her colleagues found evidence that under certain circumstances Latham's earlier conclusion that performance was the same regardless of whether or not goals were set by supervisors or participatively, was wrong.
Ordonez et al. further argue that setting too many goals or offering excessive rewards for quick results can pressure employees to prioritize quantity over quality and even resort to unethical shortcuts.
Locke and Latham countered these arguments, while leveling accusations of Ordonez et al. having violated principles of good scholarship.
A more balanced approach is necessary, involving thoughtful goal design, awareness of potential side effects, and ongoing monitoring.