Goals Gone Wild: How Goal Setting Can Lead to Disaster

Consider some recent findings on the consequences of overemphasizing achievement ...

New research by Wharton Business School professor Maurice Schweitzer and three colleagues documents the potential hazards of setting goals. In pursuit of corporate mandates, employees will sometimes ignore sound business practices, risk the company’s reputation and violate ethical standards.

This lesson, however, has not been absorbed by corporate America. To the contrary, ambitious goal setting has become endemic in American business practice and scholarship over the last half-century. It’s possible, though, that corporate goal setting can cause more harm than good.

Schweitzer believes the practice of goal setting is greatly overused. He argues that, “there are some contexts where goal setting is appropriate, such as when tasks are routine, easy to monitor and very easy to measure.” In practice, there are a series of potential problems linked to the misuse of goal setting.

Goal setting may be unnecessary in many cases. Research has shown that employees have a stronger intrinsic motivation to do a good job than their managers tend to give them credit for. This flies in the face of the conventional wisdom that says, “what gets measured, gets done.”

Schweitzer and his colleagues advise, “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.”

As business leaders, we must also ask, “what price are we paying for our love affair with measuring results in the workplace?”

What goals are set for employees at your practice and how are they measured? Do they improve performance or do they motivate people for instance, to turnover more appointments while the quality of care given to patients decreases?