Week 9: What are goals? Flashcards
What are goals?
A goal is “the end toward which effort is directed” (Merriam Webster).
- Goals are not purposes; they are tools which help direct an organization toward a certain purpose:
- “Goals are what we want, values are why we want them” (Gutman 1998)
The concept of goal is highly important in social and economic life, because:
- goals direct action
- goals inform decision-making
- goals motivate individuals to pursue them
Levels of analysis for values
- Individual goals
- Team goals
- Project goals
- Organizational goals ( that’s where usual strategic thinking is) * Societal goals (e.g., the UN Sustainable Development Goals)
Motivation is
Motivation is “the process that account for an individual’s intensity, direction, and persistence of effort toward attaining a goal”
* Intensity: how hard a person tries
* Direction: the quality of the effort of the person towards the goal
* Persistence: how long a person maintains effort
Motivation can be
Extrinsic: which occurs when the individual is motivated to receive something that is beyond their personal control for instrumental reasons (pay-for-performance, bonuses, perks, …)
- Intrinsic, which occurs when people seek need fulfillment from performing the activity itself, and not as means for other outcomes (personal fulfilment, meaningfulness, …).
Locke’s goal setting theory
- Goal setting theory focuses on the intentions (motivation) to put in place an effort to accomplish a performance objective.
- Goal setting potentially improves employee performance in two ways:
1. By amplifying intensity and persistence of effort
2. By giving clear role perceptions so their effort is channeled toward
behaviors that will improve work performance. Goal setting is more complex than
simply telling someone to “do your best.” - Effective goals have specific characteristics, which can be summarized in the acronym SMARTER: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-framed, Exciting, Reviewed.
It prescribes that:
* Specific goals increase performance
* Difficult goals, when accepted, result in higher performance than easy goals
* Feedback leads to higher performance than the absence of feedback.
Three personal factors influence the goals–performance relationship: goal commitment, task characteristics, and national culture.
* Goal Commitment. Goal-setting theory assumes an individual is committed to the goal and determined not to lower or abandon it. The individual (1) believes he or she can achieve the goal and (2) wants to achieve it.
* Goal commitment is most likely to occur when goals are made public, when the individual has an internal locus of control, when the goals are self-set rather than assigned, and when they are based at least partially on individual ability.
* Task Characteristics. Goals themselves seem to affect performance more strongly when tasks are simple rather than complex, well-learned rather than novel, independent rather than interdependent, and on the high end of achievable. On interdependent tasks, group goals are preferable. Paradoxically, goal abandonment following an initial failure is more likely for individuals who self-affirm their core values, possibly because they more strongly internalize the implications of failure than others.
* National Culture. Setting specific, difficult, individual goals may have different effects in different cultures. In collectivistic and high-power-distance cultures, achievable moderate goals can be more motivating than difficult ones. Finally, assigned goals appear to generate greater goal commitment in high than in low power-distance cultures.
Viktor Frankl theory of meaning seeking
One important critique is that self-actualization (the summit of Maslow’s pyramid) can be achieved through engaging in a process of meaning seeking and self-transcendence (going beyond our interest and do things for the sake of others).
Self-transcendence is part of intrinsic motivation, and is relational: it is not possible to transcend ourselves without having social ties and preoccupations for making humanity flourish. Self- transcending meaningfulness can be reached if it is consistent with three time- proven types of values:
* creative value: meaning is experienced when doing something for others
* experiential value: meaning is experienced when relating to others
* attitudinal value: meaning is experienced when suffering
The cascading model of goals in organizations
In organizations, goals are hierarchically distributed: more concrete and specific goals descend from more abstract and long-term goals.
Ultimate goals > Enterprise goals > Strategic goals > Project goals > Process goals
Issues in setting goals for strategic innovation: 1. Use stretch goals properly, 2. Align goals with purpose, 3. Reconcile firm-level and individual-level goals
- Use stretch goals properly:
The goals that are intentionally set to be hardly attainable, or completely impossible to be attained, whose performance levels are so high that the great majority of attempts to achieve them inevitably end in failure.
They can occur at different levels in a company, it can be a goal set at the overall strategic level (e.g., turnover, profit, …) or set at the functional or departmental level.
Benefits of stretch goals
* They lead to thinking for out-of-the-box and novel solutions, stimulating imagination, creativity, playfulness, experimentation, exploration
* They create unique company cultures that lead to competitive advantage, what Collins and Porras call “Big Hairy Audacious Goals” (BHAG)
The real purpose of stretch goals is not their attainment, but to stimulate a culture of long- term-oriented “disciplined creativity”. They have to be generated in State 2, to produce energy and commitment (and avoid impossibility)
Negative effects streach goals:
* If the goal is believed not be attainable by any means by the individual, he/she will lose motivation, leading to disengagement, demoralization, burnout, loss of security.
* Many times the higher management takes decisions and sets goals alone, without any input from the lower levels, thus without having awareness of technical and resource constraints that might occur. This leads to employee cynicism and apathy.
Issues in setting goals for strategic innovation: 1. Use stretch goals properly, 2. Align goals with purpose, 3. Reconcile firm-level and individual-level goals
- Align goals with purpose
The purpose paradox
Long-term, bold, ultimate aspirations are indeed inspiring and can convey a sense of meaningfulness in work, but because of it employees may feel a lack of connection between ultimate aspirations and the concrete, short-term-oriented tasks that they perform every day.
Example:
Case history: Solving the purpose paradox at NASA
Challenge: because the objective was at the same time concrete and so difficult to reach, there did not at first appear to be a credible connection between day-to-day work and the moon, which causes a decrease in how much employees give meaning to their tasks.
Solutions:
* NASA leaders diffused three major milestones that employees should focus their attention on, even though they could be broken down in thousands in smaller milestones. However, the small number of milestones heightened meaningfulness, also through rhetorical visual metaphors (“road to the moon”, “stepping stones”, …).
* Individuals then pieced together how employees worked on different activities in parallel to fulfill a common objective - even if different people’s work seemed
Issues in setting goals for strategic innovation: 1. Use stretch goals properly, 2. Align goals with purpose, 3. Reconcile firm-level and individual-level goals
- Reconcile firm-level and individual-level goals
Goals: from the firm to the individual
Goal alignment has been treated through two interdependent points of view:
- as a matter of setting the right control mechanisms and incentive structure that aligns
the goal of the company with the ones of the individual - the psychological aspect of goal setting for individuals in the organization, highlighting
the importance of strategic leadership.
Goals: from top managers to middle managers
The cascading of goals throughout the company is not automatic, but has to be managed. Common strategic thinking focuses a lot on the summit of the company, but mostly disregards middle managers. In other words, it focuses on strategy formulation, but not strategy implementation.
Middle managers are important in strategic innovation because:
- they are informational channels between the top management team and employees
- their own interpretation of change is important in change processes
- they might resist goals from the top management team if they are unfair or blatantly damaging the company
- they can champion innovative projects
4 types of Connecting Leaders (HBR Jaser)
fig
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
According to Maslow, as each need becomes substantially satisfied, the next one becomes dominant. So if you want to motivate someone, you need to understand what level of the hierarchy that person is currently on and focus on satisfying needs at or above that level.
- The 5 types of needs that Maslow identified are:
1. Physiological needs: Includes hunger, thirst, shelter, sex, and other bodily needs.
2. Safety-security needs: Security and protection from physical and emotional harm.
3. Social-belongingness needs: Affection, belongingness, acceptance, and friendship.
4. Esteem needs: Internal factors such as self-respect, autonomy, and achievement, and external factors such as status, recognition, and attention.
5. Self-actualization needs: Drive to become what we are capable of becoming; includes growth, achieving our potential, and self-fulfillment.
Goals: from the firm to the individual
A big managerial challenge is the alignment between organizational goals and individual goals.
* Goal alignment has been treated through two interdependent points of view:
* the first way talks about goal alignment as a matter of setting the right control mechanisms and incentive structure that aligns the goal of the company with the ones of the individual
* the second way looks at the psychological aspect of goal setting for individuals in the organization, highlighting the importance of strategic leadership.
* In strategic innovation, both aspects must be actively considered and managed.
Management-by-Objectives
Management by objectives (MBO) is a program encompasses specific goals, participatively set, for an explicit time period, with feedback on goal progress.
* The common elements of a MBO program are:
* goal specificity
* participation in decision making (including the setting of goals or objectives)
* an explicit time period
* performance feedback
* the organization’s overall objectives are translated into specific cascading objectives for each level (divisional, departmental, individual). But because lower-unit managers jointly participate in setting their own goals, MBO works from the bottom up as well as from the top down. The result is a hierarchy that links objectives at one level to those at the next. For the individual employee, MBO provides specific personal performance objectives.
