Book excerpt: Excerpt from The Effects of Goal Difficulty on Performance: A Field Experiment In spite of the theory and evidence indicating that organizations formulate goals for their activities y and the almost ubiquitous presence of budgets and quotas in organizations to influence behavior, systematic investigation of the effects of goals on behavior is rare. Psychological research on aspiration level has focused on how performance affects the aspiration level determination or how the latter is affected by personality variables or group influences. References will be found in Rotter (19510 and Lewin shag to studies which relate performance in Me; tasks to the aspiration level formation process used on the experimental task. Neither those works nor the more recent summary of Starbuck (1963) appear to indicate specific investigation of the effect of the aspiration level on performance in the same task. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.