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.
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Famous quotes containing the words goal, setting and/or business:
“What is done for science must also be done for art: accepting undesirable side effects for the sake of the main goal, and moreover diminishing their importance by making this main goal more magnificent. For one should reform forward, not backward: social illnesses, revolutions, are evolutions inhibited by a conserving stupidity.”
—Robert Musil (1880–1942)
“When I consider the clouds stretched in stupendous masses across the sky, frowning with darkness or glowing with downy light, or gilded with the rays of the setting sun, like the battlements of a city in the heavens, their grandeur appears thrown away on the meanness of my employment; the drapery is altogether too rich for such poor acting. I am hardly worthy to be a suburban dweller outside those walls.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“... a business career for a woman and her need for a woman’s life as wife and mother, are not enemies at all, unless we make them so, but may be the closest and most co-operative friends and supporter of each other.”
—Hortense Odlum (1892–?)