The Determinants Of Goal Setting And Striving?

Goals are the desired states responsible for directing individuals towards goal pursuit (Austin, Carver, Lawrence and Sheier 1996, Carver and Sheier 1981, Higgins 1987, Higgins, Loeb and Moretti 1995).
The two main phenomena that remained focus of interest in literature were goal setting and striving. Goal setting can be defined the way one establish the goals mentally (Austin and Vancouver 1996). From research we can find that goal setting has significant effect on individual’s behavior by directing actions, encouraging persistence etc. (Latham and Locke 1991, Locke 1991, 2001). While goal striving is the process in which already set goals directs individual to plan and act for goal achievement (Austin and Vancouver 1996, Kanfer and Kanfer

As goal contents have varied features like modesty, specificity, concreteness, abstraction, proximal or distal so they have different effects on the goal striving process.
Like Locke and Latham (1990) suggested that challenging goals in terms of specific are better in facilitating goal attainment as compared to challenging but vague goals. Other features are discussed like distal and proximal goal by Bandura nd Schunk (1981). Higgins (1997) suggested that goals framed with positive outcome focus resulted in higher task performance and opposite for negative outcome focused. Dwek (1996) explained that learning goals lead to better attainment as compared to performance goals. And the reason behind this is the better ability to cope with failures.
Few other researchers also explored goal contexts and their effects on goal striving. For example Ryan, Sheldon, Kasser and Deci (1996) focused on intrinsic goal striving and suggested that goals of autonomy, competence and social integration result in higher creativity, greater ability of information processing and more ability to cope with

As we already found that goal contents have a significant impact on goal striving but there’s one question still to be answered that how problems related to goal striving process can be overcome. To do this individual has to choose from different opportunities to make actions, deal with interruptions, make strategies and exert more effort in case of obstacles, failures and overcome the goal conflicts etc.
Number of researchers presented different theories to act during goal striving like the Model of action phases (Heckhausen and Gollwitzer 1987, Heckhausen 1991) suggested that successful goal pursuit can be accomplished by choosing potential goals, planning goal directed actions and started acting on plans and bridging start to the successful end. The most important part which facilitates task completion is making the respective mindsets (Gollwitzer 1990). Making such plans protect individuals from being distracted by irrelevant information (Gollwitzer and Bayer 1999).
Planning can also have types other than implementation intentions like mental simulations which explore possible ways of goal achievement. These were named as process simulations by Taylor, Pham, Rivkin and Armor