Why goals can be bad for your business!

By Maurice Schweitzer - Operations and Information Management Professor - Wharton

One of the truisms of business is that setting specific and measurable goals can only be a good thing for a business. Yet new research by Wharton operations and information management professor Maurice Schweitzer and three colleagues documents how corporate goal setting can cause more harm than good.
Schweitzer and his co-authors identify a series of problems that they say are linked to the overuse of goal setting, especially when the targets are either too specific or too challenging. For example:

• Goals that are too specific often lead employees to develop such a narrow focus that they fail to recognize obvious problems unrelated to the target. According to the authors, highly specific goals may cause workers to sacrifice safety for speed, or pursue misguided end results, as was the case at Enron. A typical problem is the sacrifice of quality in the interest of quantity, they note, citing the example of universities that require tenured professors to publish a certain number of research papers in particular journals, but without careful scrutiny of the quality of the work.
• Likewise, too many goals have what the authors consider an inappropriate time horizon. They refer to the well-known example of managers who are pressured to meet quarterly earnings goals, causing them to ignore long-term strategic problems. The reverse side of this practice is that employees also have a tendency to ease up when goal horizons are set too low. The paper cites a 1997 study of New York City cabdrivers who found that on rainy days, taxis tended to disappear from the congested streets because drivers met their fare target early in the day and went home, rather than working longer hours to make additional income.
• Workers with highly specific and ambitious targets will engage in risky practices in order to meet them. The authors note the case of one of the nation's largest banks at the time, Continental Illinois, where in 1976 the CEO issued a mandate to dramatically expand the loan portfolios to match those of some rival banks. The bank aggressively pursued new loan customers and even bought packages of high-risk mortgages from smaller banks, which eventually caused Continental Illinois to fail.
• Unethical behavior is one of the more obvious pitfalls of overly ambitious goal setting, with potentially some of the most catastrophic consequences. The authors also note incidents where employees offered bogus results to claim that a target was reached, such as when employees falsified sales reports to meet their quota at the vision-products company Bausch & Lomb.

The irony, says Schweitzer, is that a lot of this specific goal setting is unnecessary. Research has shown that employees have a stronger intrinsic motivation to do a good job than their managers tend to give them credit for. He points to research by Stanford University organizational behavior expert Chip Heath, who "found that people tend to think that other people need extrinsic rewards more often than they really do.... To us, our work is interesting and meaningful, but we tend to think that other people come to work because of money."

Beware the 'Hedonic Treadmill'
In fact, the authors argue that this failure to recognize the value of simply doing a good job can cause managers to instead set goals and rewards that harm intrinsic motivation and place employees on a "hedonic treadmill." The notion of a hedonic treadmill, says Schweitzer, "is that people never 'get' to where they are going. For example, people constantly pursue happiness, but don't get there. They keep thinking that the next promotion, the new car, the salary raise, etc. will make them happy. They get the promotion, and that makes them happy for a time. Then they adapt and mistakenly think that it's the next promotion that will make them happy.

"People may be motivated by goals. But these goals can crowd out intrinsic motivation, so they will need more goals to motivate them in the future."

Schweitzer and his co-authors point to other negative consequences from overly specific numeric goals. For example, workers tend to lose their focus on learning new skills in favor of using tried-and-true methods to meet their quotas. In addition, companies that set targets for individual workers can create a culture of competition in which workers tend to shun teamwork in problem solving.

The authors suggest that goal setting should be undertaken modestly and carefully, with a focus more on personal rather than financial gain. They also make the case that much more research -- and more skepticism -- is needed about the practice of goal setting. "Rather than dispensing goal setting as a benign, over-the-counter treatment for students of management, experts need to conceptualize goal setting as a prescription-strength medication that requires careful dosing, consideration of harmful side effects, and close supervision," the authors write. "Given the sway of goal setting on intellectual pursuits in management, we call for a more self-critical and less self-congratulatory approach to the study of goal setting."

Source: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2162