If you enjoy understanding the reason why things work as they do, then you’ll like this section. The psychology of goal setting explains why setting goals works and the things that you can do to make your goal setting efforts more successful, more often.

However, this section is not light reading. It’s not complicated, but you do need to read the material deliberately and allow yourself to digest what you’ve read. If you’d prefer to go straight to the Action Plan and get started, click here.

Studies show:

1. Setting a challenging goal leads to higher task performance than a vague goal, such as ‘do your best’, provided you the ability to perform a particular task effectively. (Latham, Locke, & Fassina, 2002)
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2. When the task is something you don’t know how to do, it’s better to set a goal to learn the necessary skill, rather than an attain specific level of performance.
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3. Feedback is a moderator of the goal-performance relationships, i.e. feedback affects performance.
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4. People who have a high level of “self efficacy” (click here for definition) consistently outperform those with low self-efficacy. They are more committed to assigned goals, find and use better strategies to attain the goals, and respond more positively to negative feedback than do people with low self-efficacy (Bandura, 1986).
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5. Self-set goals mediate (balance) the relationship between (a) personality variables like the need for achievement and conscientiousness, and (b)performance (Locke and Latham, 2002) (read more…)

6. Goal setting predicts both performance and satisfaction better than a measure of need for achievement (Yukl and Latham, 1978).
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7. Specific, challenging goal provides cues to guide behavior and performance expectations.
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8. We tend to have one of two different goal orientations: Performance orientation, and Leaning orientation. The differences will surprise you, and one is significantly more effective than the other.
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9. On a task that requires learning, a specific challenging learning goal should be set. A learning goal shifts attention to the discovery and implementation of task-relevant strategies or procedures and away from task outcome achievement.
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