Goal commitment and the goal-setting process: Problems, prospects, and proposals for future research.

The purpose of this article is to examine the role of goal commitment in goal-setting research. Despite Lockes (1968) specification that commitment to goals is a necessary condition for the effec-tiveness of goal setting, a majority of studies in this area have ignored goal commitment. In addition, results of studies that have examined the effects of goal commitment were typically inconsistent with conceptualization of commitment as a moderator. Building on past research, we have developed a model of the goal commitment process and then used it to reinterpret past goal-setting research. We show that the widely varying sizes of the effect of goal difficulty, conditional effects of goal difficulty, and inconsistent results with variables such as participation can largely be traced to main and inter-active effects of the variables specified by the model. The major finding emanating from the widespread research on goal setting is that difficult and specific goals lead to higher levels of performance than do easy or vague goals (Locke, Shaw, Saari, Latham, 1981). There is some evidence to suggest, however, that one or more variables may act to moderate the relation between goal difficulty and task performance. First, the goal difficulty effect does not always result (e.g., Motowidto,