The Impact of Goal Setting on Survey Returns

Abstract

The article presents a study which explained the impact of organizational deadlines on employee behavior in an industrial setting. The author identifies two hypotheses derived from goal setting theory. The first is the assumption that specific goals lead to higher levels of employee performance. The second deals with the difficulty of attaining goals, stating that specific harder goals elicit higher performance than do easy goals. According to the author, questionnaires and surveys are returned faster when hard goals are set rather than goals that are not enforced.