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Executive Summary:
Encountering Setbacks, Setting Goals and the Role of Goal Orientation
Is fear an effective motivator? The findings in a forthcoming article in Human Performance by Professor Don VandeWalle of SMU Cox’s Management and Organizations department suggests not. The study “The Role of Goal Orientation on Negative Emotions and Goal Setting: When Initial Performance Falls Short of One’s Performance Goal” was conducted with co-authors John Slocum of SMU Cox, William Cron of TCU and Frank Qu of University of Houston. The study investigates how one’s goal orientation can have a positive or negative impact on important motivational processes such as goal setting. The organizational implications for activities such as employee motivation, personnel decisions, employee development, and organizational culture are also discussed.
About Goal Orientation
The concept of goal orientation originated from research with children by social psychologist Carol Dweck of Columbia University. Dweck found that children approached achievement situations, such as their academic coursework, with two broad, underlying goals—developing ability and demonstrating ability. From this insight, she identified a learning goal orientation with a preference for developing one’s competence by acquiring new skills and mastering new situations and a performance goal orientation of seeking to demonstrate and validate one’s competence by seeking favorable judgment and avoiding negative judgments from others. In the last decade, SMU has emerged as a national leader in studying the ramifications of goal orientation for adults in work and training situations. This new study examines the role of goal orientation in influencing the initial emotional reactions to negative feedback and its impact on self-set goals afterwards. “There’s a myth in our culture that fear is an effective motivator. This research would question that. It is important to see how people frame situations. In the short-term one may be able to squeeze out more production using fear as a motivator, but in the long-term it is very problematic,” explained VandeWalle.
Why It Matters
Individuals are frequently in settings where they must make their own decisions about initial goal levels and ongoing persistence of their goal. Depending on one’s goal orientation, when receiving negative feedback, a series of coping behaviors arise which can be helpful and productive in the future for goal setting or those which hinder future performance, creating dysfunctional behavior and outcomes in the future. “It’s normal for individuals to feel emotional disappointment when they fail to reach a goal but a learning goal orientation seems to buffer the initial impact and help reduce the likelihood of ongoing problems such as rumination,” explained VandeWalle. “At the other extreme is the group of people who are concerned with avoiding failure (a type of a performance goal orientation). They are preoccupied with not failing. This group, the avoiders, gets emotionally bent out of shape from negative feedback and this sabotages their future performance,” explained VandeWalle.
The negative emotion that “avoiders” feel following the negative feedback from a missed quota, undesirable test result or missed goal, siphons off their positive energy which could have been spent attaining mastery in the future or higher goals. Having an avoiding mentality can lead to withdrawal behaviors such as absenteeism, decreased commitment to the organization, decreased aspirations, and developing excuses. There is also a middle group concerned with looking good—those with a “proving” performance orientation. The “proving” goal orientation appears to be benign for the initial negative feedback response and for the long-term emotional repair process. The authors suggest that goal orientation reflects a gestalt of one’s personal goals, and thus, should be a potent factor for explaining emotional response to negative feedback. This in turn has various and numerous consequences in how people perform in work and life situations.
Novel Approaches and Implications
A unique aspect of this research comes from the investigation of the emotional responses of adults in a field setting where the participants had “real stakes” at risk. Another novel approach regarding the research is that the roles played by both proving and avoiding goal orientations has been distinguished for emotional responses. As the research shows, the avoiding goal orientation is one which can have important implications in, for example, a hiring situation. “If you have jobs where people experience setbacks or negative feedback frequently, e.g., a research scientist, or sales person, you have to consider if the negative feedback will get them down and become baggage or will they roll up their sleeves and move ahead, figuring out a way to respond,” explained VandeWalle.
It becomes important to look at individual differences as oftentimes whole industries tend to hire similar types of people. For example, as VandeWalle recounted, “Southwest Airlines is a real learning-mastering type culture; Whole Foods is the same. The employees there learn about their products to offer customers good information,” he continued. “It’s a helpful, people environment which also relates to the environment of the firm and its culture.” While other studies indicate that a performance goal orientation may sometimes be helpful, this study shows that the avoiding aspect of that orientation is not. “The avoiding individuals do not recover a quickly as those with the more flexible mindset inherent with a learning goal orientation,” VandeWalle indicated.
The findings indicate that each dimension of goal orientation may play a different role as goal-setting and performance events unfold. As the study reports:
“A high avoiding goal orientation may best predict a more intense initial negative emotional reaction to negative performance feedback, which will lead to a lower subsequent self-set goal and task performance. On the other hand, a high learning goal orientation is unrelated to negative initial emotions, but serves to mitigate the deleterious effects of negative emotions on subsequent goal-setting and fosters greater subsequent performance. While the learning and avoiding goal orientations work to produce different effects on self-set goals and subsequent performance levels, their effects occur at different points in time and work through and with negative emotions.”
This line of research has potential implications for employee staffing decisions. There are work situations where individuals may frequently face setbacks and obstacles to goal achievement—a first time expatriate assignment, stretch-goal assignments, or projects with a high magnitude of non programmed decision-making. Individuals with a strong learning goal orientation are likely to be the best candidates to staff such situations. In jobs where setbacks occur often, findings suggest that a learning goal orientation can help individuals in moving beyond their negative emotions from negative performance feedback. Employees in such situations can also benefit when their managers help them to frame their work from the perspective of a learning goal orientation. Providing mentoring and role modeling opportunities could help with this reframing process.
In essence, when predicting how individuals will react when they fail to achieve their performance goals, one’s goal orientation in particular should be considered. Motivation by fear is counterproductive. As research findings reveal, one’s goal orientation serves as a powerful motivator.
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