The relationship between managers’ goal-setting styles and subordinates’ goal commitment

South African Journal of Economic and Management Sciences

 
 
Field Value
 
Title The relationship between managers’ goal-setting styles and subordinates’ goal commitment
 
Creator van Lill, Xander Roodt, Gerhard de Bruin, Gideon
 
Subject work motivation; goal setting; commitment work motivation; goal-setting styles; supervisor-focused interactional justice; goal commitment.
Description Background: Convincing employees to set aside their self-interests and commit to collective goals is essential for the effective functioning of organisations. It is critical that the impact of different managerial goal-setting styles, and the associated impressions of fair interpersonal treatment in the workplace, is understood from subordinates’ perspective. This might clarify the psychological mechanisms involved in motivating subordinates to commit to organisational goals.Aim: The primary aim of this article is to determine the relationship between managers’ goal-setting styles and subordinates’ goal commitment. The secondary aim is to determine whether this relationship is mediated by interactional justice.Setting: A total of 451 working adults completed an online or paper-and-pen survey.Methods: A mediator model was conducted in structural equation modelling with maximum likelihood estimation and Bollen-Stine bootstrapping, with 5000 bootstrap resamples, to test the hypotheses.Results: The perception that managers are deliberative had the greatest positive direct relationship with subordinates’ goal commitment, followed by the directive style. Subordinates’ perception of managers as complaisant, in turn, were unrelated to goal commitment (amotivational), whereas the perception of managers as hostile had a negative relationship with goal commitment. Informational justice, not interpersonal justice, emerged as the only mediating variable.Conclusion: Managers should be encouraged to actively seek feedback from subordinates on their goal-setting styles. Managers can accordingly adapt their behaviour to effectively motivate subordinates to commit to organisational goals.
 
Publisher AOSIS Publishing
 
Contributor
Date 2020-11-02
 
Type info:eu-repo/semantics/article info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion — quantitative
Format text/html application/epub+zip text/xml application/pdf
Identifier 10.4102/sajems.v23i1.3601
 
Source South African Journal of Economic and Management Sciences; Vol 23, No 1 (2020); 11 pages 2222-3436 1015-8812
 
Language eng
 
Relation
The following web links (URLs) may trigger a file download or direct you to an alternative webpage to gain access to a publication file format of the published article:

https://sajems.org/index.php/sajems/article/view/3601/2208 https://sajems.org/index.php/sajems/article/view/3601/2207 https://sajems.org/index.php/sajems/article/view/3601/2209 https://sajems.org/index.php/sajems/article/view/3601/2206
 
Coverage South Africa — education; managerial level
Rights Copyright (c) 2020 Xander van Lill, Gerhard Roodt, Gideon P. de Bruin https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
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