Achievement Goals: A Social Influence Cycle

Abstract

Achievement goals have been defined as the purpose of competence-relevant behavior. In this respect they connect one of the basic human needs, i.e., competence, to one of society's core values, i.e., achievement. We propose to look at achievement goals through the lens of social influence. We review both the influence that cultural, structural, and contextual factors have on achievement goal endorsement and the influence that endorsing achievement goals allows people to have within their social space. The review allows us to propose a circular model of the influence on and of achievement goals: The culture, social structures, and contexts that are typical of a certain society shape the specific environments in which individuals develop their achievement goals, which in turn has an influence on the expression and circulation of these achievement goals into society, in a social influence cycle. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Psychology, Volume 75 is January 2024. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Compete or Cooperate? Goal Orientations and Coworker Popularity in the Knowledge-Sharing Dilemma

“…Thus, interacting with popular coworkers changes this cost/benefit calculation, leading PPGO individuals to overweight the costs of sharing knowledge with popular coworkers. Indeed, previous studies have also shown that PPGO individuals are relatively less constructive than LGO individuals in social situations [ 57 ].…”

“…As organizations undergo extensive flattening through organizational restructuring, employees’ interactions with their coworkers become more immediate and frequent [ 26 ], leading to interdependence and an increased frequency of communication. More than ever, coworkers have become organizations’ most salient resources with whom employees interact [ 57 , 58 ]. Our study provides additional empirical evidence of the importance of coworkers in the workplace.…”

“…In the knowledge-sharing context, a coworker, a recipient of knowledge, can be a critical situational factor that influences the effects of individual goal orientation on knowledge-sharing behaviors. Coworkers are social-comparison targets and important sources for obtaining valuable knowledge [ 57 ]. Social comparison increases in dyadic relationships where individuals are more similar [ 58 ].…”

Cooperative learning reduces the gender gap in perceived social competences: A large-scale nationwide longitudinal experiment.

“…This might be very useful in the early stages of research on a new mechanism, but in the present research, we were working with one of the most researched cooperative classroom methods-the jigsaw classroom-and wanted to observe what the effect would be if a nationwide educational policy was introduced. Indeed, interventions in the educational domain may be hampered when they are at odds with teachers' beliefs (Yeager et al, 2022), and-more specifically with cooperative learning-when students are not prepared to appreciate the importance of cooperation (Buchs et al, 2016) or when cooperation is promoted in otherwise competitive educational structures (Butera et al, 2021(Butera et al, , 2024. Our results showed that the jigsaw classroom has the potential to reduce the gender gap in social competences, even in the face of the extreme variability of implementation that necessarily occurs in real-life classrooms.…”

What causes social class disparities in education? The role of the mismatches between academic contexts and working-class socialization contexts and how the effects of these mismatches are explained.

“…Beyond these cognitive sources, the bias toward inherent explanations is reinforced by cultural ideas and institutional features of school contexts. In European and North American cultural contexts, the pervasive idea that a person is an independent, autonomous entity (e.g., Markus & Kitayama, 1991) may exacerbate the tendency to explain behavior as the result of the person's own characteristics (Butera et al, 2021(Butera et al, , 2024Plaut & Markus, 2005;Stephens et al, 2009). In the context of schooling, cultural ideas such as equal opportunity and meritocracy (e.g., Darnon, Smeding, & Redersdorff, 2018;Duru-Bellat & Tenret, 2012) also imply that observed differences in performance correspond to inherent differences in effort and ability.…”