Goal-oriented

Goal orientation is a "disposition toward developing or demonstrating ability in achievement situations". Previous research has examined goal orientation as a motivation variable useful for recruitment, climate and culture, performance appraisal, and selection. Studies have also used goal orientation to predict sales performance, goal setting, learning and adaptive behaviors in training, and leadership. Due to the many theoretical and practical applications of goal orientation, it is important to understand the construct and how it relates to other variables. In this entry, goal orientation will be reviewed in terms of its history, stability, dimensionality, antecedents, its relationship to goal setting and consequences, its relevance to motivation, and future directions for research.

The earliest conceptualizations of goal orientation were proposed in the 1970s by the educational psychologist J.A. Eison. Eison argued that students who approached college as an opportunity to acquire new skills and knowledge possessed a learning orientation while students who approached college with the goal to exclusively obtain high grades possessed a grade orientation. Eison originally believed that these two orientations were two ends of the same continuum and developed the Learning Orientation-Grade Orientation Scale to measure the continuum. At about the same time, J.G. Nicholls was developing a related theory that achievement motivation would lead grade school children to set high task related goals. Nicholls found that when some high-ability children encountered difficult tasks, they would use maladaptive strategies, leading to eventual feelings of helplessness, while others would use more productive coping strategies. Nicholls later conceptualized these differences as two types of achievement goals: (a) task involvement: where individuals seek to develop their competence relative to their own abilities and (b) ego involvement: where individuals seek to develop their competence relative to the abilities of others. Nicholls's early work set up Dweck's proposition of two types of goal orientation: learning orientation and performance orientation.

Dweck postulated that children with learning goals were believed to approach situations with the goal to master the acquisition of new skills, while children with performance goals were believed to approach situations with the goal of gaining approval from peers and teachers. Similar to Eison, Dweck conceptualized goal orientation as a two-dimension construct. Individuals with a learning goal orientation (sometimes referred to as mastery goal orientation or abbreviated as LGO), seek to develop their competence by acquiring new skills and mastering new situations. They are not concerned about their performance relative to others, but rather with furthering their understanding of a given topic or task. Individuals with a performance goal orientation seek to demonstrate and validate the adequacy of their competence in order to receive favorable judgments and avoid negative judgments. Although Dweck's work in this area built on the foundation laid by Nicholls, the fundamental difference between the two scholars' works was the attribution of an individual's goal orientation. Nicholls believed that the goal orientation held by an individual was a result of the possession of either an internal or external referent, while Dweck considered the adoption of a particular goal orientation to be related to the theory of intelligence held by that individual.

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