Accountability, Impression Management, and Goal Setting in the Performance Evaluation Process
通过实验室实验和实地研究，探讨问责条件如何影响人们使用目标进行印象管理或绩效导向，发现低问责时目标提升绩效，高问责时目标用于印象管理且与绩效无关。
Theoretical perspectives from accountability, impression management, goal setting, and performance evaluation suggest that accountability conditions may influence whether goals are used for impression management or performance-directed purposes. Goal theory and research suggest that goals typically are performance-directed, resulting in elevated performance under certain conditions. Alternatively, impression management theory might imply that goals may not always be performance-directed, and the goal-performance relationship may be decoupled in such cases. Accountability is proposed as influencing this relationship in addition to main effects on how people approach tasks. Two studies tested notions of how accountability influences task approaches and goal uses: a laboratory experiment with university students, and a field study of telemarketers. Convergence of results indicates that participants approached tasks and set goals differently according to accountability conditions. Furthermore, the goal-performance relationship differences reflect the use of goals for performance-directed purposes under low accountability, and for impression-management purposes under high accountability (with no goal-performance relationship), as predicted.