Department of Management and Human Resources.
School of Labor and Employment Relations.
J Appl Psychol. 2020 Apr;105(4):372-389. doi: 10.1037/apl0000441. Epub 2019 Aug 15.
To better understand how the social context affects self-regulation, we present 4 studies investigating how the perceived relative status of a goal audience influences goal commitment. As a set, these studies use different samples and methods to examine this phenomenon across a variety of contexts, goals, and audiences. Results are highly consistent, supportive of our hypotheses, and demonstrate that it matters to whom goals are made known. Specifically, the perceived relative status of the goal audience is positively related to goal commitment, and downstream performance, via evaluation apprehension. Our findings highlight that it is not enough for goals to be made known to facilitate commitment but that they should be made known to someone perceived as having higher status. Together, these results help to clarify when and how it is beneficial to make goals known to others, provide a greater understanding of social influences on self-regulation, and yield implications for performance management practices aimed at facilitating goal commitment, motivation, and performance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).
为了更好地理解社会环境如何影响自我调节，我们提出了 4 项研究，探讨了目标受众的感知相对地位如何影响目标承诺。总的来说，这些研究使用不同的样本和方法，在各种背景、目标和受众中检验了这一现象。结果高度一致，支持我们的假设，并表明向谁公开目标很重要。具体来说，目标受众的感知相对地位通过评价焦虑与目标承诺和后续表现呈正相关。我们的研究结果表明，仅仅公开目标以促进承诺是不够的，而应该向被认为地位更高的人公开目标。总之，这些结果有助于阐明何时以及如何向他人公开目标是有益的，更深入地了解社会对自我调节的影响，并为旨在促进目标承诺、动机和绩效的绩效管理实践提供启示。
