Relationship Between Goal Setting & Motivation

An effective goal can motivate the behavior that helps you achieve it. As the Cuesta College Academic Support website suggests, goals are analogous to road maps. Goals help you identify the path toward achieving them by prescribing the behavior that is required to achieve them. Your motivation sustains your efforts to stay on that path.

Mechanism

A "Psychological Bulletin" article suggests that goal setting provides a mechanism for motivation. Your motivation can explain the direction, effort and persistence that you apply toward achieving your goals. Setting goals helps direct your behavior by focusing your attention. Setting difficult goals can increase the amount of effort you put into achieving them. Goal setting can motivate your persistence by directing your behavior over an extended period of time.

Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation

You may set goals that give you either intrinsic or extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation occurs when you are motivated to use behavior for its own sake. Setting intrinsically motivating goals motivates behavior that you see as an end in itself, because the behavior is worth doing just for the sake of behaving that way. Reinforcement and punishment that results from your behavior provides extrinsic motivation. Setting extrinsically motivating goals motivates behavior that you see as a means to an end. For example, setting the goal to be a generous friend is an intrinsically motivating goal, if it motivates you for the sake of being a generous friend. Alternatively, the same goal can be extrinsically motivating if it motivates your generosity for the sake of receiving invitations to his parties.

Specificity

You may set a vague goal to try as hard as you can to lose weight, or you may set a specific goal to lose 10 pounds in three months. According to the "The Introduction to Psychology," vague goals may not provide much motivation, because you won't know whether you are actually achieving your goal. Specific goals provide more motivation, because they allow you to measure your progress and take steps to plan your behavior to meet your goals. Setting a specific goal allows you to evaluate the goal to determine if the goal is realistically attainable. Realistic and attainable goals are more motivating that vague, possibly unattainable goals.

Difficulty

You may set goals that are easy, difficult or impossible. The difficulty of a goal corresponds with a particular level of proficiency that you can measure against an objective standard. For example, you can measure your running proficiency against an objective standard by timing how long it takes you to run a mile. You may set a difficult goal to run a mile in 8 minutes, or you may set an easy goal to run a mile in 11 minutes, if you currently run a mile in 12 minutes. According to a review published in "Psychological Bulletin," setting difficult goals are more likely to motivate higher performance than setting easy goals.

Incentives

Goal setting can include incentives that enhance your motivation. For example, the company you work for may set employee performance goals that are tied to incentives like earning stock in the company or earning higher pay. These monetary incentives may enhance your motivation to reach those performance goal.