Organisational Behaviour

Introduction

        Nowadays, improving performance of employees is the one of the most important and significant concerns of all businesses. It is because employee’s performance has direct impact on the business performance and success of the company. According to McCormick (n.d) there are different methods that can be used by a company to improve its employee’s performance such as motivation strategy, employee training and performance management. However, this essay will not discuss about the mentioned methods but to focus on the goal setting method. The main purpose of this essay is to analyze the impact of goal setting in improving employee performance as well as to make some recommendations to enhance the implication and effectiveness of goal setting strategy.

Goal setting analysis

        The manager of the Human Resource department of the company has listed the four key points of goal setting strategy which are:

• Goal setting process
• Types of goals
• Levels of goals
• Interim review and feedback

This part of the essay will analyze these four key aspects of the goal setting strategy by indicating evidences from previous research and journal articles. Following is the analysis of four key points of the goal-setting strategy.

Goal setting process

        The explanation of the goal setting process from the point of view of the manager is that employees will “be assigned” “specific goals” from managers based on the company’s business performance and annual plan. So in this part of the essay, there will be two important questions that need to be addressed:

• Will the specific goals improve employee performance more than non-specific goals?
• Will the assigned goals improve employee performance more than participatory goals?

The analysis of goal specificity

        According to Locke et.al (1989) goals that are specific usually motivate employee’s performance better than vague (do your best) goal. The authors explained that specific goals provide clear objective and expectation to employees. The clear objective and detailed expectation will help employees to focus on achieving the specific goal rather than spending time on other objectives (Ordonez et.al, 2009). Locke et.al (1989) proved this idea by doing an experiment which has been described in the journal article “Separating the Effects of Goal Specificity from Goal Level”. The experiment was done by measuring the performance of 48 undergraduates after giving them different levels of goal and degree of goal specificity. The result of this experiment show that the more specific the goal is, the less variance in the performance of the undergraduates.