Okay, I have a goal of losing 20 pounds. Really. I’ve got about six pound to go. Having that target is extremely helpful. Ask my scale, it’s gotten a workout.
Along comes Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Over Prescribing Goal Setting, a new paper published in the the Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge that has the chutzpah to question the primacy of goal setting.
Besides having great taste in titles, the piece posits:
“For
decades, goal setting has been promoted as a halcyon pill for improving
employee motivation and performance in organizations. Advocates of goal
setting argue that for goals to be successful, they should be specific
and challenging, and countless studies find that specific, challenging
goals motivate performance far better than “do your best” exhortations.
The authors of this article, however, argue that it is often these same
characteristics of goals that cause them to “go wild.” Key concepts
include:
- The harmful side effects of goal setting are far more serious and systematic than prior work has acknowledged.
- Goal setting harms organizations in systematic and predictable ways.
- The use of goal setting can degrade employee performance, shift
focus away from important but non-specified goals, harm interpersonal
relationships, corrode organizational culture, and motivate risky and
unethical behaviors. - In many situations, the damaging effects of goal setting outweigh its benefits.
- Managers should ask specific questions to ascertain whether the harmful effects of goal setting outweigh the potential benefits.”
The implications here for K-12 education are enormous. Pair this up with Richard Rothstein’s work questioning the performance evaluation trend in public schools, which can be found in my blog archive by clicking here, and you’ve got the basis for the sort of questions people should be asking about school reform today.
