Working for Group Pride in a Slipper Factory1

In a manufacturing firm the management provides daily production goals for a number of small assembly lines, and reports daily performance scores to the workers. In the research reported here, employees were asked after each of 3 weeks what goal they privately preferred their team to have in the future. On two occasions measures also were made of their desire for group success and their views toward their team and its task. It was observed that managers and workers alike preferred very difficult group goals, that workers with greater desire for pride in group more commonly preferred harder goals, and that stress was greater as the team functioned more poorly. Results in this natural setting resembled those in laboratory experiments.