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A ‘HEART OF GOAL’ AND THE WILL TO SUCCEED: GOAL COMMITMENT AND TASK PERFORMANCE AMONG TEACHERS IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS[Note 13. The term ‘public schools’ here refers to publicly funded ...]
Author(s) -
PEDERSEN MOGENS JIN
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
public administration
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.313
H-Index - 93
eISSN - 1467-9299
pISSN - 0033-3298
DOI - 10.1111/padm.12201
Subject(s) - task (project management) , context (archaeology) , psychology , goal orientation , public service motivation , linkage (software) , work (physics) , goal setting , service (business) , survey data collection , social psychology , public relations , applied psychology , political science , management , business , public sector , marketing , economics , mechanical engineering , paleontology , biochemistry , chemistry , statistics , mathematics , gene , law , biology , engineering
Much research suggests that employee goal commitment is predictive of work behaviour and performance. However, public administration research has yet to establish the linkage between goal commitment and task performance in the context of public service employees. Using survey data on school teachers with administrative data on students, this article employs within‐student between‐teachers fixed effects and shows how teachers' goal commitment affects their task performance. Moreover, the article shows how task difficulty moderates this relationship. The findings suggest that higher goal commitment promotes teacher task performance, in particular, at moderate to high levels of task difficulty.