Data Bases • Custom Term Papers • Free Term Papers • Free Research Papers • Free Essays • Free Book Reports • Plagiarism? Links • Top 100 Term Paper Sites • Top 25 Essay Sites • Top 50 Essay Sites • Search 97,000 Papers @ DirectEssays.com • Search 101,000 Papers @ ExampleEssays.com • Search 90,000 Papers @ MegaEssays.com Free Essays • Term Paper Sites • Chuck III's Free Essays • Free College Essays • TermPaperSites.com • My Term Papers • Get Free Essays • Essay World • Planet Papers	Search Lots of Essays Back to Subjects - Sports & Recreation motivation motivation To demonstrate that the potential for self-evaluation can motivate performance, the potential for evaluation by external sources must be eliminated. As Bandura (1986) writes, "When environmental constraints are reduced, the influence of self-evaluative motivators becomes most self-evident" (p. 479). Thus, to determine whether the self-evaluative concerns suggested by social comparison theory motivate performance, one must ensure that people feel that they cannot be individually evaluated by an externalsource. Such control of external evaluation is made possible through the use of the social loafing paradigm (e.g., Latane, Williams, & Harkins, 1979). Social loafing refers to the finding that people put out less effort when working together than when working alone (Latane, Williams, & Harkins, 1979). Harkins (1987) has suggested that this reduction of effort stems from the fact that when participants in social loafing research "work together," their outputs are pooled; thus, they can receive neither credit nor blame for their performances. Consistent with this analysis, Karau and Williams (1993) report in a recently published metaanalysis, "In fact, social loafing was eliminated when evaluation potential was not varied across coactive (individual outputs identifiable [italics added]) and collective (individual outputs pooled [italics added]) conditions" (p. 696). Thus, the loafing paradigm provides a "no" or minimal evaluation baseline against which the effects of various sources of motivation can be measured, exactly as suggested by Bandura (1986). Given this minimal evaluation baseline, the impact of the potential for self-evaluation can be studied by manipulating a participant's access to the two pieces of information necessary for self-evaluation: (a) a measure of the participant's output and (b) an evaluative criterion against which this output can be compared. Szy@ manski and Harkins (1987) did exactly this in an experiment in which they asked participants to generate as many uses as they could (i.e., do-your-best instructions) for a common object, regardless of the creativity of those uses. Pilot work with this task showed that participants felt that they knew how many uses they had generated (their output). Therefore, to manipulate the potential for self-evaluation, Szymanski and Harkins either provided an evaluative criterion by telling participants that at the end of the session they would be told the average number of uses generated by participants in a previous version of the experiment, or Szymanksi and Harkins withheld the criterion by telling participants that to preserve confidentiality they would not be given this information. When the participants were provided with the evaluative criterion, they had an opportunity for selfevaluation by social comparison. This manipulation of the potential for self-evaluation was crossed with a manipulation of the potential for experimenter evaluation. Half of the participants were told that at the end of the session, the experimenter would come in and count the number of uses that they had generated (experimenter evaluation), whereas the other half of the participants were told that the experimenter was interested in average performance so their individual outputs would be pooled with those of others and would not be examined (no-experimenter evaluation). Replicating the social loafing effect, Szymanski and Harkins (1987) found that participants subject only to experimenter evaluation (experimenter evaluation/no criterion) produced more uses than did participants who could be evaluated by no one. Consistent with the hypothesis that an opportunity for self-evaluation through social comparison would motivate participants, Szymanski and Harkins found that the potential for selfevaluation alone (no-experimenter evaluation/ criterion) also led to performance better than that found in the no-evaluation condition (i.e., no-experimenter evaluation/no criterion). In fact, the opportunity for self-evaluation alone led to performance equivalent to that produced when participants subject to experimenter evaluation were asked to do their best to generate as many uses as possible (experimenter evaluation/ no criterion). However, this output may not represent the participants' best performance. In nearly 400 studies involving 40,000 participants in eight countries, 88 different tasks, and time spans ranging from 1 minute to 3 years, Locke and Latham (1990a) reported that participants urged to strive to attain a specific, difficult level of performance did even better than did participants asked to do their best. They argue that this goal-setting effect is the result of the potential for self-evaluation. So, just as Szymanski and Harkins (1987) argued that for self-evaluation to be possible, participants must have access to some measure of output and a criterion, Locke and Latham (1990b) argued that the goal-setting effect requires that participants have knowledge of their output (or feedback in Locke and Latham's terminology). Bibliography: none Word Count: 735
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