Total Pageviews

Wednesday 26 June 2013

The Pygmalion Effect and the Goal Setting

Can reality be influenced by the expectation of others? Although it might get to your nerves sometimes, but when some body over-expects from you, the belief does push you to cover that extra mile, if for nothing than for that feeling which comes with success that's 'shared'. Wikipedia says: Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson (1968) report and discuss the Pygmalion effect in the classroom at length. In their study, they showed that if teachers were led to expect enhanced performance from some children, then the children did indeed show that enhancement. Going Further-  J. Sterling Livingston wrote in the article Pygmalion in Management in the September/October, 1988 Harvard Business Review. "The way managers treat their subordinates is subtly influenced by what they expect of them,"The Pygmalion effect enables staff to excel in response to the manager’s message that they are capable of success and expected to succeed. The Pygmalion effect can also undermine staff performance when the subtle communication from the manager tells them the opposite. These cues are often subtle. As an example, the supervisor fails to praise a staff person's performance as frequently as he praises others. The supervisor talks less to a particular employee.
Livingston went on to say about the supervisor, "If he is unskilled, he leaves scars on the careers of the young men (and women), cuts deeply into their self-esteem and distorts their image of themselves as human beings. But if he is skillful and has high expectations of his subordinates, their self-confidence will grow, their capabilities will develop and their productivity will be high. More often than he realizes, the manager is Pygmalion."

Goal setting is something which manifests itself  in so many ways in our lives. On a personal level, setting goals helps people work towards their own objectives—most commonly with financial or career-based goals.For Complex Organizations, Management by Objectives, or MBO , is a concept expressed by Peter Drucker more than 50 years ago. This strategy for managing people, which focuses on managing teams based on their ability to complete individual and team goals. Talking about the goals Drucker suggested that they should be SMART i.e. Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time bound.


Realistic is a very tricky word. Marketing theorists always suggest to 'delight' the customers, which they say, can be done by under promising and over delivering. Under promising in an organization can be cancerous. Deliberately setting a low target is the biggest crime against excellence. Your organization will always be burdened by a lack of inspiration which comes with such an act.


The Goal Setting is considered an “open” theory, so as new discoveries are made, it is modified. Numerous studies have shown that specific and ambitious goals lead to a higher level of performance, but some recent studies and research paper indicate different findings. In Goal Gone Wild , Lisa D. Ordóñez, Maurice E. Schweitzer, Adam D. Galinsky and Max H. Bazerman argue  that the beneficial effects of goal setting have been overstated and that systematic harm caused by goal setting has been largely ignored. They have  identified specific side effects associated with goal setting, including a narrow focus that neglects non-goal areas, a rise in unethical behavior, distorted risk preferences, corrosion of organizational culture, and reduced intrinsic motivation. Rather than dispensing goal setting as a benign, over-the-counter treatment for motivation, They say, managers and scholars need to conceptualize goal setting as a prescription-strength medication that requires careful dosing, consideration of harmful side effects, and close supervision." They further say," When we set goals, we're taught to make them specific and measurable and time-bound. But it turns out that those characteristics are precisely the reasons goals can backfire. A specific, measurable, time-bound goal drives behavior that's narrowly focused and often leads to either cheating or myopia. Yes, we often reach the goal, but at what cost?"



The role of SMART goals can't be over-emphasized, but, perhaps like everything in life, the inspiration is in striking the right balance.






No comments:

Post a Comment