Goal interruptions and task performance: The additional influence of goal orientations

Highlights

• Goal pursuit is interrupted by notifications, messages or other people.

• People with performance-goal orientations react with substitution behaviors.

• Study 1 and 2 found increased performance with a performance-goal orientation.

• Study 3 found increased aggression if substitutionary performance was not possible.

• These are coping strategies when people with performance-goal orientations are interrupted.

Abstract

Goals influence performance and people need to cope with frustrations that result from interruptions of goal pursuit. Being interrupted before completing a performance task may have negative consequences for emotions and thus subsequently lead to substitution behaviours in order to restore goal completion. Three experiments examined the conditions under which an interruption of goal pursuit influences emotions and subsequent performance. Furthermore, we expected that substitution behaviours may differ depending on whether people are in a performance- or learning-goal orientation. Results of Study 1 showed that the interruption of a first task reduced positive affect for participants with a performance-goal orientation and led them to increase their performance on the next task. As expected, substitution behaviour was not found with a learning-goal orientation. Study 2 replicated this finding on a business website with a different sample and performance task. Study 3 demonstrated that participants with a performance-goal orientation reported higher intentions for reactive aggression and perceived control if they could not continue with the same performance task after the interruption. These findings point out the consequences for emotions and coping strategies of people with performance-goal orientations and emphasize the importance of situational influences in educational and occupational settings.

Introduction

Research has started to investigate how people react to interruptions while working for a goal on a task at hand (Adamczyk & Bailey, 2004; Bailey & Iqbal, 2008). Interruptions have the consequence that people need more time to complete a task, make more errors, and experience more annoyance and anxiety (Bailey & Konstan, 2006). Moreover, people pursue specific goals when working on a task, and their performance is oftentimes interrupted by messages, notifications, or by other people. It would therefore be important to specify how goal pursuit and task performance are affected by interruptions.

In many studies, goal-setting has been shown to motivate people to achieve high performance outcomes (Locke & Latham, 2002, 2020). Moreover, besides self-set or assigned goal-setting instructions, environmental cues in achievement settings may activate corresponding goals and may influence subsequent goal striving (Bittner, 2011). People are subject to situational goals in learning and work settings that influence motivation and performance simultaneously with dispositional goals (Heidemeier & Bittner, 2012). For example, people may have situational or dispositional goals to perform well on a task. Once they are activated, these goals influence subsequent task performance by increasing motivation and effort (Locke & Latham, 2002, 2020). Interestingly, findings point out similar results for activated dispositional and situational goals (Latham & Seijts, 2016).

The present research investigated how people with activated situational goals respond to interruptions of goal pursuit. Situational goals are relevant in applied contexts, because they can be activated intentionally or unintentionally by simple cues of the environment. In three experiments, people received a goal-setting instruction and were then interrupted during a first task. A subsequent task gave them the opportunity to show adaptive substitution behaviours (Chartrand et al., 2010) by demonstrating a high performance when aiming to complete their goals. Participants in the condition with performance-goal orientations, however, were expected to be more affected by the interruption of goal pursuit and to show more substitution behaviours than participants with a learning-goal orientation.