The effect of context‐specific versus nonspecific subconscious goals on employee performance

• Author: Gary P. Latham,Ronald F. Piccolo
• Published date: 01 July 2012
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/hrm.21486
• Date: 01 July 2012

THE EFFECT OF CONTEXT-

SPECIFIC VERSUS NONSPECIFIC

SUBCONSCIOUS GOALS ON

EMPLOYEE PERFORMANCE

GARY P. LATHAM AND RONALD F. PICCOLO

We investigated the effect of context-specifi c versus general subconscious

goals on job performance in a call center. Employees (n⫽ 54) were randomly

assigned to a condition where they were primed by (a) a photograph of peo-

ple making telephone calls in a call center, (b) a woman winning a race, or

(c) a control group. Job performance was measured by the (1) number of and

(2) monetary value of pledges from donor s. None of the participants in the

two experimental conditions showed conscious awareness of a prime. Anal-

ysis of variance indicated that both a subconscious context-specifi c and a

subconscious general goal aroused the implicit need for achievement as as-

sessed by a projective measure, the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT). Both

types of primed goals led to a signifi cant increase in the number of pledges

during a four-day workweek. Consistent with goal-setting theory, employees

in the context-specifi c condition raised more money than those in the gen-

eral achievement (one-tailed t-test) and control (two-tailed t-test) conditions.

© 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Keywords: subconscious goals, goal-setting theory, implicit motives

Introduction

An emerging research stream in

human resource management sug-

gests a novel way to increase the

performance of an organization’s

human resources. In addition to

setting a specific conscious goal, as recom-

mended by goal-setting theory (Locke &

Latham, 1990, 2002), priming a goal in the

employee’s subconscious (Stajkovic, Locke, &

Blair, 2006) can also enhance performance.

This research stream has emerged from ex-

periments in social psychology. The purpose

of the present experiment was to further in-

vestigate the relevance of those findings for

human resource management. Answers to

three questions were sought. First, can a pho-

tograph serve as a prime to increase job per-

formance? Second, if the answer is yes, does

a context-specific prime lead to higher per-

formance than a general prime? Third, does a

Correspondence to: Gary P. Latham, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, 105 St. George Street,

Toronto, Ontario, M5S 3E6, Canada, Phone: 416.978.5703, Fax: 416.978.4629, E-mail: latham@rotman.utoronto.ca

Human Resource Management,

Human Resource Management, July–August 2012, Vol. 51, No. 4. Pp. 511–524

© 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com).

DOI:10.1002/hrm.21486