How you think about your goals -- whether it's to improve yourself or to
do better than others -- can affect whether you reach those goals.
Different kinds of goals can also have distinct effects on your
relationships with people around you, according to the authors of a
paper published in Current Directions in Psychological Science.
People with "mastery goals" want to improve themselves. Maybe they
want to get better grades, make more sales, or land that triple toe
loop. On the other hand, people with what psychologists call
"performance goals" are trying to outperform others -- to get a better
grade than a friend or be Employee of the Year. Both kinds of goals can
be useful in different contexts. But P. Marijn Poortvliet, of Tilburg
University in the Netherlands, and Céline Darnon, of France's Clermont
University, are interested in the social context of these goals -- what
they do to your relationships.
Poortvliet's work focuses on information exchange -- whether people
are open and honest when they are working together. "People with
performance goals are more deceitful" and less likely to share
information with coworkers, both in the laboratory and in real-world
offices he has studied, Poortvliet says. "The reason is fairly obvious
-- when you want to outperform others, it doesn't make sense to be
honest about information."
On the other hand, people who are trying to improve themselves are
quite open, he says. "If the ultimate goal is to improve yourself, one
way to do it is to be very cooperative with other people." This can help
improve the work environment, even though the people with these goals
aren't necessarily thinking about social relations. "They're not really
altruists, per se. They see the social exchange as a means toward the
ends of self improvement." Other research has found that people with
these self-improvement goals are more open to hearing different
perspectives, while people with a performance goal "would rather just
say, 'I'm just right and you are wrong.'"
It's not always bad to be competitive, Poortvliet says. "For example,
if you want to be the Olympic champion, of course it's nice to have
mastery goals and you should probably have mastery goals, but you
definitely need performance goals because you want to be the winner and
not the runner-up."
But it's important to think about how goals affect the social
environment. "If you really want to establish constructive and
long-lasting working relationships, then you should really balance the
different levels of goals," Poortvliet says -- thinking not only about
each person's achievement, but also about the team as a whole.
Some people are naturally more competitive than others. But it's also
possible for managers to shift the kinds of goals people have by, for
example, giving a bonus for the best employee. That might encourage
people to set performance goals and compete against each other. On the
other hand, it would also be possible to structure a bonus program to
give people rewards based on their individual improvement over time.
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