An examination of assigned and participative goal-setting in relation to the improvement of safety in the construction industry

The conclusion that setting a specific, difficult but attainable goal will improve task performance is one of the most robust findings in the occupational psychology literature. Considerable debate exists, however, amongst goal-setting researchers about whether goals should be assigned by an authority figure (delegated) or set participatively (jointly determined). A narrative and quantitative (meta-analytic) review of literature on assigned vs participative goal-setting was conducted. The available empirical evidence to date is inconclusive. Participative and assigned goal-setting conditions were utilized as part of a much larger study conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of a behavioural approach toward the improvement of safety performance in the UK construction industry. Four construction sites were involved in the research reported in this thesis. A multiple baseline with reversal design was used. Two different experimental protocols: training, goal-setting and feedback; and goal-setting and feedback was used. Data were collected over a 55 week period (3 times per week) by trained observers using a safety performance checklist developed as part of the overall research. Results were analysed to explore the relative effects on performance of participative and assigned goal-setting methods. These demonstrate that both methods of goal-setting can be effective in improving safety performance. Participative methods were superior during the first intervention period, but the evidence, although suggestive, is inconclusive during the second intervention period. Supplementary hypotheses reveal that the goal-commitment/performance relationship does not appear to be as straightforward as previous evidence would suggest; during the second intervention, goal-commitment was higher for those working under an assigned, rather than a participative goal-setting regime, but performance was lower. Further, performance feedback appears to be more salient with assigned goal-setting, especially when training is part of the intervention.