When goals are known: The effects of audience relative status on goal commitment and performance.

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.

The assessment of commitment: advantages of a unidimensional, target-free approach.

This study presents a new approach to assessing commitment reflecting the Klein, Molloy, and Brinsfield (2012) reconceptualization. Klein et al. recast the construct to address issues hindering commitment scholarship, but their claims cannot be tested with existing measures.

The effect of negative feedback on tension and subsequent performance: the main and interactive effects of goal content and conscientiousness.

The purpose of this experiment was to examine the interplay of goal content, conscientiousness, and tension on performance following negative feedback. Undergraduate students were assigned either a learning or performance goal and then were provided with false feedback indicating very poor performance on the task they performed. After assessing tension, participants performed the task again with the same learning or performance goal.

Relationships between conscientiousness, self-efficacy, self-deception, and learning over time.

The present study examined the dual mediating effects of self-efficacy and self-deception on the relationship between conscientiousness and learning over time. Data from 134 college students were used to investigate the relative impact of self-efficacy and self-deception. Consistent with the hypothesized model, conscientiousness was significantly and positively related to both early training self-efficacy and self-deception, and both self-efficacy and self-deception had significant effects on learning but in opposite directions.

Perception in consequences of free riding.

This study examined the relationships between perceptions of group members' free riding and group outcomes using Mulvey and Klein's 1998 perceived free riding scale. In a laboratory study, three free riding conditions were created (no free riding, free riding, free riding with justification) in which 97 college students performed two short number-finding tasks as members of temporary ad hoc three-person groups. 55% of the students were male and the average age was 22.

The Assessment of Goal Commitment: A Measurement Model Meta-Analysis.

Goals are central to current treatments of work motivation, and goal commitment is a critical construct in understanding the relationship between goals and performance. Inconsistency in the measurement of goal commitment hindered early research in this area but the nine-item, self-report scale developed by Hollenbeck, Williams, and Klein (1989b), and derivatives of that scale, have become the most commonly used measures of goal commitment. Despite this convergence, a few authors, based on small sample studies, have raised questions about the dimensionality of this measure.