ABSTRACT
To verify the central theoretical assumption that goals or intentions are the most immediate regulators of human behavior (cf. Locke, Shaw, Saari, & Latham, 1981; Ryan, 1970), to date goal-setting research has mainly focused on performance measures as dependent variables, especially on quantity measures. As a consequence, the range of application of the theory to industrial field settings is also nearly exclusively restricted to improvement of productivity (Austin & Bobko, 1985). These restrictions, however, are neither inherently required by the theory nor caused by a lack of other practical problems that the theory may potentially have the power to solve. Quite the opposite, just as in industrial field settings, new, unexplored phenomena can be observed opening goal-setting theory to a broader range of application, and therefore to a broader range of significance as well.
