Where does goal-setting collide?

The performance target a person is trying to reach, and the central variable of Locke and Latham's goal-setting theory: their 1990 book A Theory of Goal Setting and Task Performance gathered several hundred studies to argue that specific, difficult goals produce higher performance than easy goals, vague goals, or urging people to do their best. Their 2002 review, Building a Practically Useful Theory of Goal Setting and Task Motivation, restated the core claim and its main moderators: the effect holds only when the person is committed to the goal, receives feedback on progress, has the ability, and the task is not too complex. Here a goal is a motivational target chosen for its difficulty and clarity, and difficulty is a feature that helps rather than a problem. It is measured by the specificity and difficulty of the goal a person is assigned or sets, with task performance as the criterion.[1][2]

Unit

A worker's assigned or self-set performance target

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Goal specificity and difficulty, assigned or self-set, with task performance as the criterion

The reference value that a negative-feedback control loop drives toward: the loop compares a perceived input against this value and acts to reduce any discrepancy between them, the same way a thermostat holds a room to a set temperature. Powers's 1973 Behavior: The Control of Perception built a theory of behaviour around such loops, in which what an organism controls is its own perception relative to an internal reference. Carver and Scheier's 1982 article carried this framing into personality and self-regulation, treating a goal as the setpoint of a discrepancy-reducing loop rather than as a target selected for being hard. On this reading a goal carries no notion of difficulty at all: it is simply the value the system is organised to match, and it is studied by modelling the loop's gain and the reduction of the perceived gap over time.[3][4]

Unit

A reference value a feedback loop is organised to match

Recovery means

The loop acts to close the gap between the reference value and the perceived state until the two match

Measured by

Modelled through loop gain and the reduction of the discrepancy between reference value and perceived input

The target state or condition a planning system must bring about, starting from an initial state and choosing a sequence of actions that reaches it. Fikes and Nilsson's 1971 STRIPS represented a goal as a conjunction of conditions on the world state and searched for an operator sequence whose effects made those conditions true. The same idea runs through later work, including goal-conditioned reinforcement learning, where a goal parameterises the reward so that a single policy can be trained to reach many target states. Here a goal is a formal description of a desired state, not a motivational aim or a control setpoint, and success is defined by whether the plan or policy actually reaches it.[5]

Unit

A target world state a plan or policy must reach

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Whether a plan or learned policy reaches the specified goal state from the initial state

The standard by which a person judges their own competence in a school, sport, or work setting, and the reason they pursue an activity in the first place. Nicholls's 1984 account distinguished a task orientation, where competence means learning or mastering the task, from an ego orientation, where competence means outperforming others. Elliot and McGregor's 2001 2 x 2 Achievement Goal Framework crossed that mastery versus performance distinction with an approach versus avoidance dimension, giving four goals such as mastery-approach and performance-avoidance. A goal here is not a difficulty level or a target state but a definition of what success would mean, and it is measured with self-report goal-orientation questionnaires rather than by the height of a target.[6][7]

Unit

A learner's standard for judging their own competence

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Self-report goal-orientation questionnaires, including the mastery and performance by approach and avoidance scales