(Medical Xpress)—In many areas of our everyday lives, goals are the norm. That not all of them are effective, however, is something which anyone who has seen their New Year resolutions crumbling with each passing month can confirm. "From the literature on motivation and goals we know that goals should be specific, measurable, accepted, realistic and limited in terms of time," says economist Sebastian Goerg from the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn, commenting on the key to success. To clarify the relationship between work goals, monetary incentives and workers' performance, he and his colleague Sebastian Kube sent test subjects to look for books in a library. They discovered that a combination of self-chosen goals and monetary incentives had a particularly motivating impact on work performance.
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