A Comparison of Self-Generated Task Strategies and Explicitly-Provided Task Strategies in the Context of Goal Setting

By using a complex, managerial, decision-making simulation, the longitudinal effects of self-generated task strategies as compared to explicitly-provided strategies and no strategies were investigated in the context of goal setting. The simulation placed participants in the role of a hypothetical manager for a furniture manufacturing organization. The task of the participants was to assign several employees to different jobs dealing with weekly work orders for the manufacturing of specific pieces of furniture. Participants were also asked to make decisions regarding the setting of performance goals for these employees, providing feedback, and allocating rewards. A sample of 120 college students was used to test the hypotheses that individuals who possessed task strategies (self-generated or explicitly-provided) would have higher levels of self-efficacy, be more committed to assigned goals, set higher personal goals, and outperform individuals who were not given any strategy information. Furthermore, individuals who generated their own strategies during session I were hypothesized to have higher levels of self-efficacy, set higher goals, and have higher performance during session 2 on an even more complex version of the same task than those individuals who were explicitly-provided with strategies. Goal difficulty was proposed to interact with strategy such that assigned difficult goals and strategy information would result in the highest performance, but difficult goals and no strategy information would result in the lowest performance. The findings suggest that possession of task strategies increased self-efficacy and performance but had no effect on goal commitment or personal goals. Goal assignment had no effect on any of these variables except goal commitment. However, generative activity in strategy development was found to further enhance performance in terms of increasing the ability of individuals to transfer strategies to more complex versions of the same task at a later date as compared to when no generative activity occurred. Implications for using self-generation as a training technique and future goal setting research are discussed.