Setting Goals Can Influence Employee Beliefs About the Reason For Their Success Or Failure

Today’s best managers know that employee participation in setting goals can influence employee beliefs about their own performance. Employees who participate in setting goals for their performance tend to believe that the cause of their performance is something outside of themselves, such as task difficulty, when they are successful. However, they tend to blame themselves when they are not successful at reaching their performance goals. On the other hand, employees who don’t help set their own goals tend to believe the opposite. They believe that success was their own fault and failure was the fault of something outside of them.

Source: Karakowsky, L., & Mann, S. L. 2008, February. Setting goals and taking ownership: Understanding the implications of participatively set goals from a causal attribution perspective. Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies, 14, 260-270.