Commentary: Trust and Confidence: The Fertile Soil for Effective Goal Setting

In “Goal Setting in the Australian Public Service: Eff ects of Psychological Empowerment and Organizational Citizenship Behavior,” Jeannette Taylor’s examination of goal setting through the lens of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) reminds us that people are not oxen—autonomy, self-determination, and control are important determinants of human performance. Th e focus on OCB moves away from the usual examination of the mechanics of developing goals or ticking boxes in a performance management process. It moves us toward thinking more deeply about how public sector leaders and managers might structure work such that the people they lead willingly give their motivation, commitment, and engagement to achieve organizational goals. OCB explicitly acknowledges that the eff ort people give to their organization—or, perhaps more important, what they withhold from the organization—is discretionary. In refl ecting on Taylor’s article, I was reminded of an earlier work by Beer and Cannon (2004) that described the impact of Hewlett-Packard’s (HP) introduction of performance-based pay in the 1990s. Th roughout the 1980s, the company invested in building the “HP Way” as an inclusive and hightrust culture that refl ected many of the core tenets of OCB. In the 1990s, HP introduced a performancebased pay approach. Th is was in keeping with the zeitgeist of the decade. To its credit, HP included a range of practices and incentives to encourage team performance that sought to reinforce the philosophical tenets of the HP Way. Unfortunately, despite the best intentions of the new program’s architects, the more behaviorist approach to goal setting and performance management was internally divisive and promoted behaviors that ran counter to the HP culture. In my reading, the main casualty of this change Trust and Confi dence: Th e Fertile Soil for Eff ective Goal Setting Commentary