Management and Organization Behavior

Dr. Leigh Stelzer

REFERENCE OUTLINE: GOAL SETTING, W&N, Chapter 9

Objectives:

Set/evaluate your goals for this course.

Goal Setting is the idea of establishing a level of acceptable performance to increase motivation and performance. Goals are desired future outcomes. Goals when compared with present performance act as motivators. Authors make point that there can be goal conflict among stakeholder groups that have the power to influence the organizations decisions.

Rules for goal setting based on empirical investigations:

1. Set specific goals. (Specificity makes clarity.) Specific, objective, quantitative goals are better than general or vague goals. They give you something real to shoot for. Also they seem to evoke higher levels of interest, less boredom.

Do x, accomplish x, y, z level rather than the vague "do your best".

2. Assign difficult and challenging goals to get more work. People work up to a challenge. You do more than you might otherwise with easy goals.

3. Goals must be acceptable. Not so difficult that they are seen as unrealistic or that they are rejected.

4. One way to increase acceptance and communication --that is to say clarity --is by involving workers in the goal setting process. Get them to buy into the goals. However, there is no evidence that participation by itself leads to greater levels of performance.

When the issue is performance, it does not seem to matter whether the goals were set internally or externally ( whether the goals are your own or your boss's). Participation can increase the likelihood that goals will be communicated and understood.

Participation has a greater effect on worker satisfaction than on performance. It would appear, further, that through participation you can increase satisfaction at no cost to performance. Participation should be viewed as an ethical standard (goal).

Participation can also result in better understanding of goals. By participating one learns more about problems, constraints, objectives, etc. But not always. I have been to many meetings where people came out with different interpretations of the goals. Leaders should make sure this does not happen, if that is their objective. Note, some leaders want to obfuscate. They want to avoid controversy, slide over disagreements, rather than confront them. Watch Clinton.

What about commitment to the goal (to the organization)? The connection between participation and commitment is tricky. The belief is that if people participate, they buy in. Of course, if they are given the chance to alter the goals, it makes it easier for them to buy in. Public v. private commitment.

5. Feedback on goal accomplishment increases performance levels. Just telling people how they are doing, simple outcomes or results, helps them. You would be surprised at how often workers simply have no idea how they are doing. They do a small piece of a job, are not responsible for quality control, never see the final product, never have contact with clients or customers. White collar workers just pass on paper, and never see the results.

Whereas results are helpful, the best feedback is specific information about why performance was less than the goal and how to increase performance. Sometimes success is hard to measure objectively/precisely. Define performance by specifying behaviors that we believe will lead to success. For example, good teaching is often judged on the basis of performances rather than on the learning by students.

In a review that examined the results of twenty-eight studies of the effects of objective feedback, all twenty eight showed positive results. Studies of goal setting almost uniformly have shown increases in productivity, some as high as twenty and thirty percent.

It is not enough to set goals. You must also consider the four factors that moderate the relationship between goals and performance.

Ability to do the job. Need skills, training, intelligence.

Task complexity. When the going gets tough, multiple abilities are tested.

Commitment to goal.

Feedback about performance.

Performance (achievement of the goal) is not enough as an outcome. As a manager, consider also the rewards, personal satisfaction, and consequences that are outcomes that feed back to goal acceptance and performance.

Enhancing performance through rewards. List of reward systems, p. 223. Note that the rewards are closely associated with the work. Gain sharing rewards workers who become involved in improving work. They are rewarded by the improvement and the money that comes from the improvement. Profit sharing gives employees a portion of profits without regard to their performance.

If you give a worker time off as a reward for working, you are communicating work stinks. He is being rewarded for leaving work. By giving a person more control and responsibility and the money that goes with it, you are saying you value the work.

Management By Objective

MBO is a joint goal setting that asks the worker to participate in setting her/his own goals. Objectives, quotas, performance standards are agreed to. MBO assumes empowerment and autonomy of the worker. He must have some control of his own work for MBO to be applicable. Manager plays role of counselor and facilitator. Needs to withhold judgements and be willing to adjust goals.

Model

Boss------>Organization Goals--------> Standard

Worker---->Career Goals--------------> Rewards