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The effect of primed goals on employee performance: Implications for human resource management
Author(s) -
Shantz Amanda,
Latham Gary
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
human resource management
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.888
H-Index - 94
eISSN - 1099-050X
pISSN - 0090-4848
DOI - 10.1002/hrm.20418
Subject(s) - subconscious , psychology , human resource management , social psychology , set (abstract data type) , priming (agriculture) , human resources , applied psychology , resource (disambiguation) , control (management) , public relations , management , political science , computer science , economics , medicine , botany , alternative medicine , germination , pathology , biology , programming language , computer network
Overwhelming evidence in the behavioral sciences shows that consciously set goals can increase an employee's performance. Thus, HR professionals have had little, if any, reason to be interested in subconscious processes. In the past decade, however, laboratory experiments by social psychologists have shown that goals can be primed. That is, people's behavior is affected by goals of which they are unaware. Because a conscious goal consumes cognitive resources, this finding has important implications for employee efficiency in the workplace. This paper discusses the results of priming a performance goal in two organizational settings. Call center employees who were primed using a photograph of a woman winning a race raised significantly more money from donors than those who were randomly assigned to a control group. A meta‐analysis revealed that a photograph can prime the subconscious to increase job performance. The results of the present study demonstrate that subconscious motivation is a concept worthy of exploration for both human resource scholars and practitioners. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.