Range Goals as Dual Reference Points: Insights for Effective Goal-Setting and Pursuit

• Main Authors: Wallace, Scott G, Etkin, Jordan
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Decision making; Influence
• ISSN: 0098-9258

Goal-setting is a crucial determinant of performance and well-being. But how should goals be set? The prevailing answer focuses on the specificity and difficulty of a goal's objective (Locke and Latham 1990, 2002). Specific, challenging goals generally improve performance relative to non-specific "do-your-best" goals, and "moderately vague" goals like range goals (e.g., lose 10-15 pounds) fall in between. Specific goals are thus widely considered the "gold standard" of effective goal-setting. We propose an alternative approach to understanding range goals. Drawing on the theory of goals-as-reference points (Heath, Larrick, and Wu 1999), we construe range goals as offering two possible reference points (vs. the single reference point of specific goals; Scott and Nowlis 2013), and posit that these dual reference points can be leveraged to improve performance. Extending prior work treating range goals as less precise (and thus less motivating) than specific goals (Locke and Latham 1990; Wright and Kacmar 1994), we demonstrate that range goals can sometimes be more motivating than specific goals. When pursuing a range goal, people can adopt one of three reference-point strategies: focusing on just the lower endpoint, just the upper endpoint, or switching between the lower and upper endpoints. The lower endpoint of the range defines the outcome that avoids failure, so intuitively, some people may adopt it as their (sole) reference point. The upper endpoint, in contrast, demarcates a high level of performance, so more motivated individuals may adopt it as their (sole) reference point (treating it like a high specific goal). Alternatively, some people may use both range endpoints as reference points by, for example, initially focusing on the lower endpoint (e.g., lose 10 pounds) then switching to the upper endpoint (e.g., lose 15 pounds) after accumulating goal progress. We propose that treating the dual endpoints of a range goal as sequential targets and switching from the lower to the upper endpoint produces the highest level of performance-even compared to a specific goal set at the top end of the range. A key tenet of goals-asreference-points theory is that motivation increases with proximity to a salient reference point (Heath et al. 1999; Kivetz, Urminsky, and Zheng 2006). Relative to focusing on one endpoint or setting an equivalent specific goal, switching from the lower to the upper endpoint should keep goal pursuers closer to their salient reference poi