Learning Goals and Their Impact on Performance

At the same time, personality and dispositional goal orientation are iintegrated through a hierarchy of goals where personality is associated with higher order goals (values), which affect intrinsic motivation. The link to performance is hypothesized through the impact of goal orientation. Under a performance orientation, individuals are less likely to increase effort when they encounter difficulty because they assume that if they do not possess the ability to solve the situation, an increased effort will do little to help. This lack of effort when facing challenge is likely to depress their performance.On the other hand, under a learning orientation, individuals will experience an adaptive pattern and they are more likely to increase effort when encountering difficulty and this effort is likely to increase performance. Short Description A model evaluates the influence of distal factors, such as culture on individuals? dispositions to adopt either learning or performance goals with p erformance. The paper presents several hypotheses on the influence of cultural dimensions, dispositional goal orientation, and individual performance.Keywords Cultural Values Goal Orientation Organizational Behaviour Human Resources 5 Goals and Performance of Global Firms Personality and Culture: Learning Goals and Their Impact on Performance of Global Firms Much research in organizational behavior has often ignored the impact of national culture on the individual (Boyacingler and Adler, 1991). This is not surprising since national culture’s influence in organizational behavior occurs at such a deep level that people are not usually aware of its influences (Triandis, 1983).For example, even though it is clear that values and goals of societies differ, most theories on work motivation have been made in the US with a US perspective (Boyacingler and Adler, 1991). This may encumber the generalizability of some of these motivation theories to a global environment because, as Hofst ede (1980) affirms, even when some principles in motivation may be almost universal, the way managers implement them depend on individual differences in values and goals.These differences are determined by local conditions (Hofstede, 1980), and can be analyzed through the predominance of specific cultural dimensions. This paper contributes to fill the void of culture in many motivation theories, and considers the influence of cultural dimensions on intrinsic motivation, specifically, how cultural dimensions may influence an individual’s goal orientation. Culture and mid-range theoriesLytle, Brett, Barsness, Tinsley, and Janssens (1995) suggest some guidelines for the study of how culture can affect mid-range theories like goal orientation: The first step includes the development of a functional definition of culture and its dimensions, then the identification of a mid-range theory, in this case goal orientation within intrinsic motivation, and finally, the generation of speci fic hypotheses about why and how those cultural dimensions will influence goal orientation.