Goal Setting in Business
In business, goal setting encourages participants to put in substantial effort. Also, because every member has defined expectations for their role, little room is left for inadequate effort to go unnoticed.
Managers cannot constantly drive motivation, or keep track of an employee’s work on a continuous basis. Goals are therefore an important tool for managers, since goals have the ability to function as a self-regulatory mechanism that acquires an employee a certain amount of guidance Shalley, 1995 and Locke and Latham (2002) have distilled four mechanisms through which goal setting can affect individual performance:
- Goals focus attention toward goal-relevant activities and away from goal-irrelevant activities.
- Goals serve as an energizer: Higher goals induce greater effort, while low goals induce lesser effort.
- Goals affect persistence; constraints with regard to resources affect work pace.
- Goals activate cognitive knowledge and strategies that help employees cope with the situation at hand.
Read more about this topic: Goal Setting
Famous quotes containing the words goal, setting and/or business:
“The preservation of life seems to be rather a slogan than a genuine goal of the anti-abortion forces; what they want is control. Control over behavior: power over women. Women in the anti-choice movement want to share in male power over women, and do so by denying their own womanhood, their own rights and responsibilities.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin (b. 1929)
“In my dealing with my child, my Latin and Greek, my accomplishments and my money stead me nothing; but as much soul as I have avails. If I am wilful, he sets his will against mine, one for one, and leaves me, if I please, the degradation of beating him by my superiority of strength. But if I renounce my will, and act for the soul, setting that up as umpire between us two, out of his young eyes looks the same soul; he reveres and loves with me.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“God forgive me, I do still see that my nature is not to be quite conquered, but will esteem pleasure above all things; though, yet in the middle of it, it hath reluctancy after my business, which is neglected by my following my pleasure. However, music and women I cannot but give way to, whatever my business is.”
—Samuel Pepys (1633–1703)