Do you set personal work goals for yourself at the beginning of each year? Does your employer ask you to list goals that improve your performance and the performance of the company? If so, do you set goals that you are likely to attain anyway (self-efficacy)? Do you set goals that only seem better because they improve on relatively poor performance (reference-dependence)? Do you “shift the goalposts” to align with expectations (changing the stakes)? In any case, how do you—or how does a company—evaluate whether goal-setting systems are successful?
While research has shed light on these and related questions, our understanding of the causal relationship between goals and expectations, and how goals and expectations impact performance, remains limited. This paper employs a novel experimental design to address that gap. The authors assign participants a task (counting 1s in tables of 0s and 1s), varying participants’ self-set goals and expectations at the start of the task. The authors vary the level of practice difficulty and by that change participants performance expectations; and they ask (some) participants to set goals for the number of tables to solve and encourage some of them to make the goals easier or harder.
Among other features, the authors’ experimental design allows them to learn whether different expectations lead to different goals; whether different goals—given the same initial expectations—lead to revised post-goal-setting expectations; and how different combinations of goals and expectations affect performance in the main task and post-completion sentiments. They find the following:
- Participants set goals they expect to reach on average 78% of the time.
- When participants are asked to set ambitious or attainable goals, they revise their goals by about +/-25%. These goal revisions have a limited impact on expected performance; instead, participants adjust their expected likelihood of reaching the goal.
- There is no evidence that eliciting a goal affects expectations; beliefs in the Baseline and No Goal treatments are similar. In other words, goals reflect expectations but largely do not affect them.
- Changing the practice tables changes performance. Participants in the easy practice solve 1.9 (17%) more tables than those with the hard practice. These effects hold both when participants set an explicit goal or when no goal is elicited.
- Eliciting a goal improves performance. Participants in the Baseline goal treatment complete 0.77 more tables than the No Goal treatment (a 6.5% increase). Further, the average positive effect of having a goal on performance is not driven by the effect of increasing performance to hit a goal, but instead by a broader increase in performance. In other words, goals increase motivation on a task, or the perceived returns to any additional completed task, regardless of distance to the goal. That said, participants do care about the goals and try to meet them, but the effect on performance is local. Some do more to hit the goal, some do less once they did.
Bottom line: Expectations matter. Having a goal is motivating, but conditional on expectations, the difficulty of a goal is not instrumental in changing performance. Let’s make this real, based on an example provided by the authors. Imagine sitting down with your manager to discuss goals. Going into the meeting, you have some expectations about what you can achieve, and you eventually agree to some goal. This research suggests that getting to this goal matters more than the difficulty of the goal.
What does this mean in practice? For example, imagine that your manager convinced you to set a goal beyond your expectations. However, this is likely a goal that you will not reach, which is suboptimal for you, your manager, and the company. Instead, imagine a more motivational manager who convinces you of her vision and inspires you to do more, irrespective of some goal. In this instance, rather than putting resources toward choosing goals, efforts to increase expectations result in better outcomes.