Participative goal setting is the process of identifying, adopting, and
articulating relevant goals from higher-order objectives, mission, and purpose, and
integrating, translating, and adapting them at the team level. Participative
goal-setting is instrumental in helping teams to achieve
and sustain high-performance.
Teams probably cannot achieve or sustain levels of
high performance, and even more certainly cannot continually improve, if
they do not have clear goals and measures of performance.
We also take as a given that teams will be
more committed to goals and measures of performance that they
have developed themselves, or have at least participated in their
development. Teams cannot know how [well] they are doing without
clear goals and measures; nor could they objectively assess and
demonstrate degrees of improvement. Research and experience both show consistently
that participation in goal-setting (i.e. participative goal setting) leads to
more effective performance management systems in terms of understanding and
accepting goals and measures and in motivating (driving) behaviour.
Other topics in our resources on Team Building related to Participative Goal-Setting include: