Research, goal setting not suitable for women

[howtorebuild]

I recently read an article, now can't find it, indicating goal setting is suitable for Men not Women. The research suggested another method works better for Women. Does anyone know anything about this research so I can find it on google?

Sorry, no. Maybe buffy will?

Was it this research howto?

Its bollocks though - completely nonsensical 'achievements' at 25p for each achieved.
If the incentive had been £10 an answer, the results may well have been different.

It's a very small group - 109 participants. So results are not exactly robust. And of course it won't be that no women are incentivised by goal setting, only that on average, with these small groups, women weren't. I think it's annoying that they didn't really look at other groupings. They may also have found the same sorts of average differences between, say, arts students and science students. But they didn't look, so we'll never know and we get more of the Mars/Venus thinking.

But it doesn't mean it isn't generally the case in our society. There's no reason to suppose that gendered socialisation wouldn't have an impact on how we react to incentives, although also no big reason to assume that it would. If it is true it could be useful for organizations to improve their management techniques by encouraging them to including greater variety and flexibility.

And the research objective was to identify the incentive of goal setting, not the incentive of 25p. So all correct answers got 25p whether the participant reached the goal or not and whether a goal was set or not. The results showed that men got significantly higher scores when a goal was set, even though that goal wasn't rewarded. Where as for women there was no significant difference between having a goal set and not having a goal set. There was no significant difference between men and women's average scores though. So the research showed that women, on average, do better than men when there is no goal set.

But the goal is bollocks and meaningless. All this potentially says is men will react to a meaningless goal more than women. If achieving the goal meant they got £1m, maybe the women would be more goal orientated.

All this potentially says is men will react to a meaningless goal more than women.

I would not be surprised by that at all. If you look at the world, it is mostly men who are participating in meaningless competition.

Yes. From a people management point of view it says if your staff are mainly men, you may not need to attach monetary rewards when you set goals.

Ok thanks, so you think bigger financial rewards for goals achieved will work best?

Although, again, 109 people. One experiment. And almost certainly not a subject pool that is representative of the whole population. Not exactly the most robust evidence. But a springboard for further research if you were interested in that sort of thing.

howto works best for whom? What I think experiments that highlight these sorts of differences really show is that humans are diverse and to manage a group of them well you need to know them individually and tailor your management to the individual, or, for group rewards, have more than one strategy.

for group incentives I mean.

I am interested in order to encourage my dd to do her physio.

That's tricky if she doesn't like them!

For an individual you need to find what works for her. What has got her going in the past? Is the physio need a short term or long term thing? If short term, and she responds well to rewards, then a monetary or toy (don't know how old she is) incentive might work well. OR the promise of a day out or something. If she's very competitive then a goal without rewards but where you watch and remark on how brilliant she is might work, especially if she could post something to facebook or some other social media site lauding her successes. If it's long term you need to work towards making her want to do it for its own sake. That could be reward based - if young then something you provide now, but as she grows making sure she's aware of how much she gains from doing the phisio in terms of mobility(?), ability to earn more money because she is healthier(?) reduced pain(?). But I have also read that long term self motivation is best encouraged by focusing on how good it feels to have completed something, so after she's done it focus on her feelings of accomplishment and then on what new thing she can achieve that she wouldn't have done if she hadn't done the phisio.

Don't know how useful that is. And I'm not a psychologist, so may be completely of base. Have you asked her phisio about good incentives?

howto I think goals are useful there because they are clear benefits to your DD.

It's not really the goal that's useful though. It's doing the physio. You can make that goal based or process based. e.g. concentrate more on the experience of doing it - make it social or add music or some other way of making hte actual activity more enjoyable; focus on moving between different exercises, or on how it feels as you do it; evaluate succes on the basis of the overall benfefit afforded rather than on reaching x number of repetitions, etc.

Goal setting is very pervasive in organizational culture because it's easy to tick boxes, but it isn't the only way to look at things.