Does monitoring goal progress promote goal attainment? A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence.

Abstract

Progress monitoring and goal attainment 2 AbstractControl Theory and other frameworks for understanding self-regulation suggest that monitoring goal progress is a crucial process that intervenes between setting and attaining a goal, and helps to ensure that goals are translated into action. However, the impact of progress monitoring interventions on rates of behavioral performance and goal attainment has yet to be quantified. A systematic literature search identified 138 studies (N = 19,951) that randomly allocated participants to an intervention designed to promote monitoring of goal progress versus a control condition. All studies reported the effects of the treatment on Moderation tests revealed that progress monitoring had larger effects on goal attainment when the outcomes were reported or made public, and when the information was physically recorded. Taken together, the findings suggest that monitoring goal progress is an effective self-regulation strategy, and that interventions that increase the frequency of progress monitoring are likely to promote behavior change. The present review investigates the impact of monitoring goal progress on rates of goal attainment. Goals are mental representations of desired outcomes (Austin & Vancouver, 1996) -such as to run a marathon or to be happy -and goal intentions are selfinstructions to act towards those outcomes (Sheeran & Webb, 2011;Triandis, 1980). Goal intentions capture both the nature of the set goal (e.g., the number of exercise sessions that one intends to engage in this week) and how committed one is to attaining it (e.g., the strength of one's intention to exercise five times this week). Intentions are the starting point for the willful control of action (Gollwitzer & Moskowitz, 1996). However, evidence indicates that intentions have only a modest impact on performance. A meta-analysis of 47 experimental studies found that a medium-to-large-sized change in intentions had a smallto-medium-sized effect on subsequent behavior (Webb & Sheeran, 2006). Evidence indicates that people who intend to exercise do not necessarily do so (Rhodes & de Bruijn, 2013), that most people want to be happier than they are (Oishi, Diener, & Lucas, 2007), and that it has become almost as traditional to fail to achieve New Year's resolutions as it is to form them in the first place (Marlatt & Kaplan, 1972;Norcross & Vangarelli, 1988). In short, forming a goal intention is not, on its own, sufficient to ensure goal attainment (for reviews, see Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006;Sheeran, Milne, Webb, & Gollwitzer, 2005;Sheeran & Webb, 2011;Webb, 2006). This 'gap' between intention and action (Sheeran, 2002) has led researchers to investigate which factors determine intention-behavior consistency. For instance, properties of intentions such as temporal stability (Cooke & Sheeran, 2004; Sheeran & Abraham, Progress monitoring and goal attainment 4 2003), the extent of actual control over performance (Sheeran, Trafimow, & Armitage, 2003), and the operation of habits (Neal, Wood, Wu...

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