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Learning goals or performance goals: Is it the journey or the
destination?
By Gerard H. Seijts and Gary P. Latham
May/June 2006
Reprint # 9B06TC06
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Ivey Business Journal May/June 2006
Learning goals or performance goals: Is it
the journey or the destination?
While setting goals is important, setting an outcome
goal - rather than a learning goal -- can have a negative
impact on an individual's performance. This is especially
true when acquiring skills and knowledge is more
important than being persistent and working harder.
Instead of focusing on the end result, a learning goal
focuses attention on the discovery of effective
strategies to attain and sustain desired results. These
authors build a compelling case for learning goals'
superiority and describe the positive impact they can
have on leadership, performance appraisal, and
professional development.
By Gerard H. Seijts and Gary P. Latham
Gerard H. Seijts is Associate Professor of
Organizational Behaviour at the Richard Ivey School
of Business.
Gary P. Latham is Secretary of State Professor of
Organizational Effectiveness at the Rotman School of
Management, University of Toronto.
The good and the bad of setting goals
Nearly all executives understand the importance of goal
setting. And yet, most organizations have no idea how to
manage specific, challenging goals, or what are sometimes
labelled "stretch goals." For example, some organizations
may ask employees to double sales or reduce product-
development time but fail to provide those employees
with the knowledge they need to meet these goals. It is
foolish and even immoral for organizations to assign
employees stretch goals without equipping them with the
resources to succeed - and still punish them when they fail
to reach those goals. This lack of guidance often leads to
stress, burnout, and in some instances, unethical behaviour.
The Lucent scandal is a compelling example of what
can happen when people feel undue pressure to make the
numbers. Richard McGinn, the former CEO of Lucent,
prided himself for imposing "audacious" goals on his
managers, believing that such a push would produce
dream results. In 2000, McGinn pushed his managers to
produce results they could not deliver-not, apparently,
without crossing the line. The pressures that McGinn
applied were described in a complaint that a former
Lucent employee filed, charging that McGinn and the
company had set unreachable goals that caused them to
mislead the public. Empirical research supports this claim,
namely that setting unrealistic performance-outcome goals
sometimes causes people to engage in unacceptable or
illegal behaviour.
These findings point to a fault with the type of goal
that was set, namely the performance-outcome goal.
Setting a learning goal, on the other hand, is likely to be
far more effective in helping individuals discover radical,
out-of-the-box ideas or action plans that will enable
organizations to regain and sustain a competitive edge.
This paper discusses both types of goals and explains
why learning goals can be more effective and when it is
more appropriate to use them.
Goal mechanisms
Generally speaking, there are at least four benefits of setting
goals.
1. Specific performance goals affect an employee's
choice about what to focus on, or which actions
are goal relevant and which are not.
2. Goals help employees adjust their effort and
persistence according to the goal's level of
difficulty.
3. Goals help employees persist until they have
reached them.