Read Aloud the Text Content

This audio was created by Woord's Text to Speech service by content creators from all around the world.

Text Content or SSML code:

GOAL SETTING AND GOAL ORIENTATION: AN INTEGRATION OF TWO DIFFERENT YET RELATED LITERATURES Uniting separate research streams on situational and dispositional goals, we investi gated goal setting and goal orientation together in a complex business simulation. A specific learning goal led to higher performance than did either a specific performance goal or a vague goal. Goal orientation predicted performance when the goal was vague. The performance goal attenuated correlations between goal orientation and perfor mance. The correlation between a learning goal orientation and performance was significant when a learning goal was set. Self-efficacy and information search medi ated the effect of a learning goal on performance. Goal setting studies have their roots in organiza tional psychology, in contrast to research on goal orientation, which has roots in educational psy chology. The focus of goal orientation studies is primarily on ability, whereas that of goal setting is on motivation. Consequently, the tasks used in goal setting research are typically straightforward for research participants, as the emphasis is primarily on effort and persistence. The tasks used in studies of goal orientation are usually complex, as the fo cus is on the acquisition of knowledge and skill. Performance is a function of both ability and moti vation. Yet one research camp rarely takes into account findings by the other. The result is increas ing confusion in the literature between a perfor mance goal and a performance goal orientation; between the roles of situational as opposed to dis positional goals as determinants of behavior; the circumstances in which a learning goal versus a learning goal orientation is likely to increase per formance; and whether goal orientation is a mod erator of the goal-performance relationship. The purpose of the experiment reported here was to draw connections between these two related yet separate streams of work in organizational behav ior, namely, goal setting and goal orientation.