Factors Affecting Goal Difficulty and Performance When Employees Select Their Own Performance Goals: Evidence from the Field
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT: This study examines factors influencing the difficulty of self-set goals and performance in a setting where employees were able to choose their performance goal from a menu of three choices established by management. Rewards for goal attainment were increasing in the difficulty of the goal. We develop a behavioral model of the factors expected to affect employees’ goal choices and performance. Anticipated influences on goal difficulty include employees’ impression management intentions, past performance, experience, and prior eligibility for rewards. We also expect performance to be related to goal difficulty. We use a unique combination of archival and questionnaire data from 476 employees at several call centers of a financial services company to test our hypotheses. All predictions are supported: the difficulty of self-set goals is negatively associated with employees’ impression management intentions; employees with better past performance set more difficult goals; and both prior performance and goal difficulty are positively associated with current period performance. We conduct supplementary analysis examining the extent to which employees selected attainable goals and the impact this had on performance. We also analyze the extent to which ratcheting concerns may have influenced actual performance for those employees who attained their goal. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it