Concept of Goal Setting
Since we have chosen to use the term goal in preference to other related concepts such as intention, task, or purpose, it will be useful to give our reason and to show the relationship between the term goal and these other concept.
The term intention refers specially to a psychological state. It may refer to a goal, but it more often refer to a determination to take a certain action. Combined term such as “Task-goal” has occasionally been used in the literature, but such terms seem unnecessarily complicated and redundant. The term task had too much of an external focus for our needs. The term level of aspiration was too narrow because it ruled out goals that did not involve a specific level of performance, and yet which we frequently studied.
Goals that are deemed difficult to achieve and specific tend to increase performance more than goals that are not. The best way to make a goal more specific is to set quantification. For example, by demanding “boost efficiency by 50%,” or by describing certain specific tasks that should be completed.
Setting goal affects outcomes in four ways:
Choice
Effort
Persistence
Cognition
Choice is the basic concept or things that are priority of goal whether it is difficult or easy no matter. Goals are constricted attention and the direct efforts towards goal-related activities, and it is away from the perceived unwanted and goal-irrelevant action.
Goals can lead to more effort; for example, if one typically produces 4 widgets an hour, and has the goal of producing 6, one may work more intensely towards the goal than one would otherwise.
Effort is one of the most important things that we use to achieve our goal at finite time. Simply effort is a thing that decides that you achieve your goal or not. Effort and result are simultaneously related to each other, good effort provide good result and less effort provide bad result.
Persistence is when someone shows high interest to work through setbacks when chasing a goal. Anything worth achieving in life requires constant effort. Just having a meaningful goal is not enough, to make a difference we need to continuously take action. We need to be persistent, as we strive to reach our goals, working daily towards the achievement of our goals become compulsory. Persistence is necessary as meaningful goals don’t come easy.
Cognition is goals can lead individuals to develop and change their behavior.
A goal is what an individual is trying to accomplish, it is the object or aim of an action. The concept is similar in meaning to the concepts of purpose and intent. Other frequently used concepts that are also similar in meaning to that of goal include performance standard, quota , work norm (a standard of acceptable behavior defined by a work group), task , objective (the ultimate aim of an action or series of actions), deadline, and budget (a spending goal or limit).
Earlier attempts by behaviorists to reduce concepts like goal and purpose to physical events have been strongly criticized. The environment, of course, can influence goal setting as well as goal acceptance, an issue that is dealt with in some of the recent research; the basic assumption of goal-setting re- search is that goals are immediate regulators of human action.
Goal setting might be called “stimulus control” by a modern behaviorist, but the key question then becomes, What is the stimulus if it is only an as- signed goal (an environmental event), then the importance of goal acceptance is ignored;—ultimately the individual’s goal. However, no one-to-one correspondence between goals and action is assumed because people might make errors, they might not have the ability to reach their objectives, or have subliminal conflicts or premises which challenge their conscious goals.
Would you like to read more about this topic? This book might interest you: Goal Setting Theory.