Positive Psychology at Work:

Goal Setting and Environment Contingencies

Despite all that is known about how goals can aid engagement, wellbeing, enjoyment, performance and satisfaction, managers still frequently manage to use goal setting as a technique in a way that achieves all the opposite effects. This is because they don't understand well enough the relationship between environment, action and consequence on goal-seeking behaviour. Daniels explores this in some depth in his book Bringing out the Best in People (2000). To understand how some goal setting produces motivated behaviour while other goal setting produces disengaged behaviour, we need to understand something of the difference between positive and negative reinforcement and punishment.

If behaviour is being reinforced, it increases. If it is being punished, it decreases. The setting of goals is normally intended to increase or decrease some behaviour: production behaviour, selling behaviour or absence behaviour, for example. This matters not one whit. Whether goals achieve the desired increase or decrease in behaviour depends entirely on the contingencies around the goal. Intentionality is irrelevant. It is the consequences attendant on achieving the goal that are important in determining whether the goal works to increase or decrease the desired behaviour. There are four main sets of contingencies that affect behaviour (see Figure 3.1). Positive and negative reinforcement lead to an increase in behaviour. Positive and negative punishment lead ...