ABSTRACT
Search behaviors are an important but neglected component in the study of effort on complex tasks in which strategy development has a signicant inuence on performance. On many tasks in organizations, the effort devoted to the acquisition of information will exceed the effort spent processing the information obtained. An understanding of search behaviors is also important to the generalization of results from laboratory studies of motivation on complex tasks to work settings where task environments are more dynamic and less well dened for the task performer. In this chapter, the motivational dynamics of external search behavior on complex tasks are considered within a social cognitive framework (Bandura, 1986, 1997).
Studies of motivational processes on complex decision-making tasks have identi-ed several effects that, on the surface, appear inconsistent with motivational effects observed on simpler tasks in which behavioral effort is more directly related to performance. There is a large body of evidence that, for simple tasks, behavioral effort and the resulting performance are positively related to the self-regulatory
processes of (a) negative self-evaluative reactions, such as dissatisfaction with past performance, (b) commitment to specic, challenging goals, and (c) strength of self-efcacy beliefs (for reviews, see Bandura, 1986, 1997) . All three motivational states have been shown to have consistent, positive effects on performance in the presence of relevant feedback for simple effort-to-performance tasks, such as ergometers (e.g., Bandura & Cervone, 1986), where the strategy development and information processing requirements are quite limited by the task or study setting. The explanations for these effects are the arousal, focusing, and persistence mechanisms commonly used in motivational theories (e.g., Kanfer, 1990; Locke & Latham, 1990).
