Do individual goals support team performance?
A team can consist of employees who meet their individual goals without jointly delivering the expected result. For SHR’s “Team Performance” programme, the management question is specific: how can individual goals be set without undermining the work that colleagues depend on?
What the literature establishes
Ad Kleingeld, Heleen van Mierlo and Lidia Arends (2011, Journal of Applied Psychology) show in a meta-analysis that specific, difficult group goals improve group performance compared with nonspecific goals. Their analysis also distinguishes individual goals that direct effort towards the group’s result from those that prioritise personal achievement. This distinction matters: an individual goal can support the team or compete with its interests.
The mechanism: directing attention and effort
Edwin Locke and Gary Latham (2002, American Psychologist) explain that goals direct attention, mobilise effort, sustain persistence and encourage the search for strategies. Their effectiveness depends, among other things, on commitment, feedback and task complexity. Applied to interdependent work, this framework suggests checking whether each person’s assigned priorities include the contributions that others need to do their work.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that all individual goals should simply be replaced with a collective goal. That would go too far: the meta-analysis specifically distinguishes several ways of combining the two levels. The problem is therefore not individual accountability itself, but the possibility of succeeding against one’s own indicator while damaging the shared result. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot settle
These studies do not provide a universal weighting of individual and collective goals. The variety of tasks and research designs limits direct transfer to a particular team. In practice, observing that everyone meets their goals is likewise insufficient to establish that those goals improve overall performance.
A practical check in Fribourg
Within SHR’s “Team Performance” programme, a pilot could be offered to an agri-food team, a bilingual industrial team or a project connecting a business with Fribourg’s university sector. Across two successive periods of equal length, it would compare existing goals with individual goals that each specify a contribution to the shared deliverable, using matching French and German wording where needed. The measure would be the proportion of planned deliverables submitted on time and accepted without rework, assessed against criteria established before the test and recorded in a shared log. The scope and difficulty of deliverables should remain comparable: an improvement would provide useful local evidence, not causal proof. To go further: explore the Team Performance training in Fribourg, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Team Performance in Fribourg
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