I've known for some time that goals are good. We've long been told that setting a goal at the beginning of a coaching session is important, and that if we can encourage our clients to identify specific and measurable goals for themselves at the end of a session then they are more likely to put their plans into action. But it was good to read Locke and Latham's paper (2002) which summarises the research on goal setting and explains why it works.
First, it's encouraging to note that there is good and solid and widespread evidence that it does work. Goals are linked with people putting in more effort and achieving more. And a specific goal results in more effort and better performance than simply encouraging someone to 'do their best'.
But there's more.
I had thought that it was crucial to set appropriate, ie moderate goals. Apparently not always. In general, the harder the goal, the more effort people put in and the more the attain. There is an issue about what this might do to people's confidence (of which more later), but broadly speaking, the harder the goal the better.
Locke and Latham explain how goals work:
1) they direct attention and effort towards the goal and away from other things - both cognitively and behaviourally ie, you think more about making sure that your efforts are linked to achieving the goal
2) they energize. And linked with the comment above, high goals lead to greater effort than lower goals
3) they affect persistence and in particular people carry on working for longer when the goals are hard
4) goals lead to better strategies. People either use strategies they already have, transfer strategies over or learn new strategies when they have a specific goal in mind.
Other important factors are:
Goal commitment
goal commitment strengthens the link between goals and performance. Goal commitment is enhanced when the outcome of the goal is important to the individual, and when the individual has high self-efficacy ie believes that they have the ability to achieve it.
Self-efficacy seems to come up all over the place, but helpfully the authors of this paper give some empirically tested methods for enhancing self efficacy. They suggest that the individuals need to be adequately trained (so that they do actually have the ability to achieve the goal), they need to see role models that they can relate to who have previously achieved the goal, and they need to be helped to develop specific strategies.
Feedback is important so that the individual can see how well they are doing and knows how much harder they need to try.
Task complexity has am impact. Goal setting works better for simple tasks. With complex tasks it seems to be more effective to set a range of small interim goals (ie one for each simple task involved).
Satisfaction: a goal seems to act as a sort of yardstick for satisfaction. Achieving or exceeding a goal leads to satisfaction and failing to meet a goal leads to dissatisfaction. This then presents us with a bit of a dilemma - there seems to be a choice that needs to be made between setting a challenging goal which is likely to lead to a higher performance or to set a lower goal which is likely to lead to higher satisfaction.
There has clearly been a huge amount of research conducted on goal setting, but I am pleased now to have a slightly clearer understanding of what it all means and how and why it works.
Locke, E.A. and Latham, G.P. (2002) Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation: A 35 year Odyssey American Psychologist 57 (9) 705 - 717
