Monday morning and you find yourself back in the office or hard at work in whichever industry you are in. Are you wondering how to shed off the relaxation feeling that the weekend has left you with and find yourself in need of some motivation?
According to a new study done at the University of Leicester, researchers found that men work harder when given specific goals. They looked at the effectiveness of goal-setting within the workplace. These goals were non- binding which meant that there was no reward or punishment for a successful or unsuccessful task.
109 participants took part in a timed- addition task; ‘summing up sets of five two-digit, randomly drawn numbers over five minutes’ using three groups, namely:
• Control- no goal was given.
• Low goal – to achieve 10 correct answers
• High goal- to achieve 15 correct answers
After the experiment was conducted, researchers found that men are more motivated than women when it comes to achieving goals, setting goals can have the same influence on success as monetary incentives and leads to better focus and increases the rate by which a task could be completed.
According to Medical Daily “Participants in the low goal and high goal groups attempted more questions, got more right, and answered with greater accuracy than the group where no goal was given.”
However, interesting evidence presented itself when they compared the two goal groups as ‘neither group distanced itself significantly from the other, which led them to decide that it was important to have a goal, but not as important to set a specific value to that goal’.
Samuel Smithers, a PhD student at the University of Leicester and lead researcher of this study, said that the aim of the study was to determine how to motivate people.
“When we are given a goal, we feel a sense of purpose to achieve it; it naturally helps to focus us. The findings demonstrate that setting a goal induces higher effort.”
So go on and set goals for yourself, be it short -term or long- term goals, as this is one thing that you oust women in men, note that these goals can pertain to anything; health, career and relationships.
Source: Medical Daily
Alice Paulse
