A ‘HEART OF GOAL’ AND THE WILL TO SUCCEED: GOAL COMMITMENT AND TASK PERFORMANCE AMONG TEACHERS IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS
| Published date | 01 March 2016 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12201 |
| Date | 01 March 2016 |
| Author | MOGENS JIN PEDERSEN |
doi: 10.1111/padm.12201
A ‘HEART OF GOAL’ AND THE WILL TO SUCCEED:
GOAL COMMITMENT AND TASK PERFORMANCE
AMONG TEACHERS IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS1
MOGENS JIN PEDERSEN
Much research suggests that employee goal commitment is predictive of work behaviour and
performance. However, public administration research has yet to establish the linkage between
goal commitment and task performance in the context of public service employees. Using survey
data on school teachers with administrative data on students, this article employs within-student
between-teachers xed effects and shows how teachers’ goal commitment affects their task
performance. Moreover, the article shows how task difculty moderates this relationship. The
ndings suggest that higher goal commitment promotes teacher task performance, in particular, at
moderate to high levels of task difculty.
INTRODUCTION
How to ensure and improve the public services performance is a theme at the heart of pub-
lic administration research. Nevertheless, our knowledge about the determinants of public
organizations’ performance is incomplete (O’Toole and Meier 1999; Boyne et al. 2006).
A specic set of unresolved questions relates to the consequences of public employees’
goal commitment, dened as ‘a volitional psychological bond reecting dedication to, and
responsibility for, a particular target’ (Klein et al. 2013, p. 67). Based on goal setting theory
(GST), several studies emphasize the importance of goal commitment to performance
(Locke and Latham 1990, 2004, 2013; Klein et al. 1999, 2013; Seijts and Latham 2000a; Erez
and Judge 2001; Schweitzer et al. 2004; Latham and Locke 2007; Latham et al. 2008a). Yet
research that specically examines the linkage between goal commitment and perfor-
mance among public service employees is needed. A review by Latham et al. (2008b) on the
applicability of GST in the practice of public sector management makes clear that far more
GST research has been conducted in the private than in the public sector.Empirical studies
that test the assertions of GST in public service settings are relatively sparse. Exceptions
include Selden and Brewer (2000): using a sample of federal executives, they nd support
for Locke and Latham’s (1990) ‘high performance cycle’ model (for other exceptions, see
Chun and Rainey 2005; Wright 2007; Rutherford and Meier 2015). Moreover, commitment
research within public administration scholarship has focused primarily on organiza-
tional commitment (Balfour and Wechsler1996; Moon 2000; Moldogaziev and Silvia 2014).
Public administration scholars have thus called for greater attention to GST processes in
public organizations (Perry et al. 2006) and to the correlates of public employees’ goal
commitment (Wright 2007).
This article examines how the goal commitment of public service employees relates to
their task performance at work: do public service employees with a ‘heart of goal’ exhibit
higher task performance? Using survey data for 382 Danish school teachers with adminis-
trative data on 3,621 of their students, the article estimates the relationship between teach-
ers’ goal commitment and their task performance in educating their students (measured by
the students’ test scores achievements). The main estimation strategy is a within-student
Mogens Jin Pedersen is in the Department of Political Science and Government, Aarhus University,Denmark.
Public Administration Vol.94, No. 1, 2016 (75–88)
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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