The present research investigated the effect of sufficiency of reward on the principles that elementary school children employ to allocate rewards to others. Results indicated that Justice children allocated a smaller proportion of reward to the winner of a game when they were distributing insufficient and oversufficient quantities of reward than when they were distributing a sufficient quantity of reward. Results also indicated that kindergarten children allocated significantly less reward to the winner than did older children. These results were interpreted as indicating that no single norm can explain the reward allocation behavior of children. However, the results reaffirmed past findings which indicated that the norm of equity is the most important determinant of children’s reward allocation behavior.
The present research investigated the effects of goal assignment and coworker feedback on the goal level set, and the effects of number of coworkers on quantity of production. Results indicated that the effects of goal setting are moderated by the presence of group norms. This finding can easily be incorporated into goal theory. However, contrary to expectations, subjects who were assigned the average of the self-set goals coded significantly more data than subjects who set their own goals. Moreover, neither of these means differed significantly from that generated by subjects who had been assigned a specific hard goal set by the experimenter. Social comparison theory proved usefulfor explaining all the results obtained, including those that appeared to be inconsistent with previous findings.A large portion of the recent research in motivation has been in the area of Locke's goal theory (Locke, 1968). This theory deals with the relationship between conWe wish to thank Lawrence Messi of Michigan State University and Ron Johnson of Texas A & M University for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript. Portions of this article were presented at
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