The Impact Of Task Complexity On Goal Setting Effects

One of the core findings of Goal Setting Theory,which was established by Locke and Latham,is individuals under difficult and specific goals performing better than those under other types of goals,such as easy and specific goals,do your best or no goals.It was regarded as a well-known theory of motivation psychology and one of the most reliable management tools in the field of industry and organization psychology.However,it met some challenges when it was applied into other fields,such as sports and cognitive psychology.By comparing Goal Setting Theory based on motivation with Goal-free Effect originated from Cognition load Theory,task complexity was figured out as an important factor which may successfully solve these troubles.As it was noted before,a complex task is in a high demand of cognitive resource,which is initially limited,and it will make goal setting come into failure.Thus,it is quite essential to explore the connection between task complexity and goal content from the perspective of cognitive resource.Three laboratory studies were conducted logically.They all made focuse on the relationship of task complexity and Goal Setting Effect.Study 1 was aimed to explore how task complexity influences goal setting effects when participants were asked to finish only one task.Respectively,there is a dual-task model in Study 2 and Study 3,which is more complex than one task.The target of the research was to find out whether a difficult and specific goal could lead to better performance than an easy and specific goal or a vague goal like do your best both in easy and complex tasks.Different from Study 2,Study 3 was designed to directly measure the cognitive load,an index of consumption of cognitive resource,and covers more range complexity of tasks in order to figure out how task complexity influences the goal setting effect.In Study 1,participants who were randomly divided into difficult and specific groups outperformed other groups when goal attainment was moderate.In study 2,the interaction was significant among goal content,task complexity and the rank of individuals' abilities of memory which was divided into strong and weak groups in the percentile of 33 and 67.It means that the effect of goal setting depended on both abilities and task complexity.In the last study,it was found out that goal setting would not make a positive role unless cognitive load was not too high.Combining findings above,goal setting effect has a boundary variable,cognitive resource.It may provide some practical suggestions to managers and individuals in need.