MORALE AND MOTIVATION

Morale and Motivation in the Canzalian Credential Assessment Unit



Goal establishment is the process by which individuals set goals or standards that represent desired behavioral states. These goals are a function of the individual's past behavior and self-efficacy, defined as the 'self-belief in one's capabilities to exercise control over events to accomplish desired goals'. According to SCT, the goals held by individuals arranged in complex hierarchies consisting of proximal (short-term) and distal (long-term) goals (Joosten, Bundy & Einfeld, 2009). However, in contrast to Control Theory propositions, SCT states that proximal goals are not clearly subordinate goals whose sole purpose is to serve as a means of obtaining superordinate goals. Rather, proximal goals act as a source of self-satisfaction, increasing feelings of personal mastery and self-efficacy and helping to sustain interest in the task while also facilitating progress towards distal goal attainment.

Following goal establishment, individuals engage in a period of self-observation where they monitor their behavior or performance with respect to a given task. Although this process is common, Bandura argues that individuals do not automatically engage in self-observation for all behaviors, but rather they focus on behaviors that perceived as being important and/or related to the attainment of valued internal goals. After a period of self-observation, individuals engage in self-evaluation by utilizing the information gathered during self-monitoring to make comparisons between their current behavior and their behavioral goals (Wen-Chung & Chen-Ling, 2010). The results of this comparison lead to affective and cognitive self-reactions such that performance that meets or exceeds one's goal (i.e., a positive goal-behavior discrepancy) leads to satisfaction and an increase in a self-efficacy while performance below one's goal (i.e., a negative goal-behavior discrepancy) leads to dissatisfaction and a decrease in self-efficacy. Following a negative discrepancy, the dissatisfaction experienced by the individual exerts a motivational force to engage in cognitive and/or behavioral measures designed to reduce the magnitude of this discrepancy (i.e., discrepancy reduction processes).

This may entail increasing effort, changing task strategies, lowering one's goal, or abandoning the activity if the goal-behavior discrepancy is sufficiently large. According to SCT, the choice among these alternatives is likely to be influenced by the individual's self-efficacy and his or her beliefs concerning the causes of their performance (i.e., causal attributions). Following a definite discrepancy, individuals proposed to set higher standards for themselves (i.e., discrepancy production processes), although Bandura acknowledges that this tendency is likely to depend on the individual's self-efficacy beliefs, his or her ability level, and the perceived importance of the behavior (Edwards, Hall & Hill, 2011). It is important to note that these discrepancy production and reduction tendencies are not automatic; individuals may respond differently to discrepancy feedback due to disposition, affective, cognitive, and contextual factors which influence perceptions of goal- performance discrepancies.

Taken together, these two mechanisms - discrepancy production and discrepancy reduction - thought to regulate performance such that effective self-regulation comes from alternating cycles of discrepancy production and discrepancy reduction; individuals set challenging goals for themselves creating a goal-behavior discrepancy, work towards reducing this discrepancy, ...