Job-Goal Importance
If individuals do not perceive performance objectives as meaningful or important, they have little reason to strive to achieve them. This is of particular interest in the work setting, where employees are expected to achieve not their own personal objectives but performance objectives assigned by others. In practice, however, there may be little distinction between assigned goals and self-selected goals.3 In fact, many studies have found a strong link between assigned goals and subsequent personal goals (Early and Lituchy 1991; Locke and Latham 1990), with assigned goals proving to be just as effective at increasing performance as participatively set goals, as long as some rationale for the goal is provided (Latham, Erez, and Locke 1988).
There are a number of ways in which organizations can affect employees' perceptions of the importance of their assigned work. For example, Rainey and Steinbauer (1999) suggest that the effectiveness and performance of government agencies may be enhanced by three interrelated levels of intrinsic rewards-task, mission, and public service-dial are available through the employees role in the organization. This assertion is consistent with the goal theory of work motivation and its expectation that employees will expend greater effort toward achieving performance goals that they believe will result in important outcomes (Locke and Latham 1990). Similar to the concept of task significance, if employees view the organization's mission as important and congruent with their own values, then they are more likely to incorporate organizational goals into their own sense of identity and view their assigned roles in achieving those goals as personally meaningful (Weiss and Piderit 1999) (see figure 1). This emphasis on the relationship between the importance of job goals and organizational goals may be especially important for public sector organizations (Wright 2001), as they are more likely to employ individuals whose values and needs are consistent with the altruistic or community service nature of the organization's mission or goals (Crewson 1997; Frank and Lewis 2004; Houston 2000; Perry and Wise 1990). Consistent with this research, goal theory provides an important theoretical framework for investigating the separate but related contributions of task and mission motivation by suggesting that public employees are motivated to achieve their performance objectives because they place greater importance on their jobs when working for an organization that they believe provides a valuable public service.