There’s been a lot of talk about goal setting theory in the past few decades. Take a trip to your local bookstore and you’ll see shelves packed with books on the importance of goal setting, how to set goals, and how to achieve them. It’s become a major topic for corporate speakers and department heads. Goals are the driving force behind any kind of human achievement, in every field of endeavor. But it’s only been in recent years that the business world has started really driving this home to all their employees. These days it’s an area that’s being studied by university researchers and productivity experts alike.
The basics of goal setting theory aren’t complicated. When a person or entity sets a goal, it tends to focus their efforts intensively on that goal, and takes their attention away from objectives that aren’t associated with it. Of course, this is the whole purpose of goal setting, but for individuals and companies it means that care has to be taken when setting goals, because if they’re not written correctly, then unintended consequences can result. Depending on what those unintended consequences are, the results can range from trivial to disastrous.
The second main plank of goal setting theory has to do with the difficulty of achieving the goal. When choosing a goal, it’s important that reaching it has to be difficult enough that it will take strenuous effort to achieve it, but not so difficult that it’s virtually impossible to attain. This can be difficult to balance. Researchers have found that if a goal is too easily reached, it loses its effectiveness in inspiring the group or person to shoot for other goals. But if it’s too hard, the discouragement that comes from shooting for a goal that’s almost impossible to reach, and the subsequent failure, can be devastating to morale. So it’s important to clearly think out your goals, so as to not interfere with other objectives, and to make it reasonably hard to accomplish, but not too hard.
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