Self Evaluation Motivates Performance

Self Evaluation Motivates Performance

To demonstrate that the potential for self-evaluation can motivate performance, the potential for evaluation by external sources must be eliminated. As Bandura (1986) writes, "When environmental constraints are reduced, the influence of self-evaluative motivators becomes most self-evident" (p. 479). Thus, to determine whether the self-evaluative concerns suggested by social comparison theory motivate performance, one must ensure that people feel that they cannot be individually evaluated by an externalsource. Such control of external evaluation is made possible through the use of the social loafing paradigm (e.g., Latane, Williams, & Harkins, 1979).

Social loafing refers to the finding that people put out less effort when working together than when working alone (Latane, Williams, & Harkins, 1979). Harkins (1987) has suggested that this reduction of effort stems from the fact that when participants in social loafing research "work together," their outputs are pooled; thus, they can receive neither credit nor blame for their performances. Consistent with this analysis, Karau and Williams (1993) report in a recently published metaanalysis, "In fact, social loafing was eliminated when evaluation potential was not varied across coactive (individual outputs identifiable [italics added]) and collective (individual outputs pooled [italics added]) conditions" (p. 696). Thus, the loafing paradigm provides a "no" or minimal evaluation baseline against which the effects of various sources of motivation can be measured, exactly as suggested by Bandura (1986).

Given this minimal evaluation baseline, the impact of the potential for self-evaluation can be studied by manipulating a participant's ac...

... middle of paper ...

...riterion).

However, this output may not represent the participants' best performance. In nearly 400 studies involving 40,000 participants in eight countries, 88 different tasks, and time spans ranging from 1 minute to 3 years, Locke and Latham (1990a) reported that participants urged to strive to attain a specific, difficult level of performance did even better than did participants asked to do their best. They argue that this goal-setting effect is the result of the potential for self-evaluation. So, just as Szymanski and Harkins (1987) argued that for self-evaluation to be possible, participants must have access to some measure of output and a criterion, Locke and Latham (1990b) argued that the goal-setting effect requires that participants have knowledge of their output (or feedback in Locke and Latham's terminology).

Bibliography:

none