Abstract
Although goal conflict is an important part of classic and contemporary theories of motivation, the correlates of goal conflict are not well understood. We identify and distinguish conflicting and facilitating goals, and assess relations with goal attainment and psychological well-being in a short-term, prospective study design. Results from multilevel models demonstrated that individuals with greater conflict were less successful in attaining their goals, but the goals they failed attain were not necessarily the ones in conflict. People who experienced goal conflict tended to be ruminative and hesitant, and reported greater levels of negative affect and increases in depression, anxiety, and psychosomatization. People who experienced goal facilitation reported greater levels of positive affect, life satisfaction, and successful goal attainment. This study identifies several implications of holding conflicting and facilitating goals, but also points to a theoretical inconsistency pertaining to goal conflict. Namely, conflicting goals may not be inherently less attainable than nonconflicting goals. We argue that distinguishing between goal- and person-level factors is essential for understanding goal striving.
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Notes
These and other significance tests of within-person correlations are based on treating the N = 180 r-to-z transformed correlations as scores and testing the null hypothesis that the values were sampled from a distribution with a mean of 0.00. Reported mean values in the text have been transformed back to r.
A panel of three undergraduate research assistants classified each goal into a hierarchical goal taxonomy structured around eight broad content domains, including academic/occupational, social relationships, financial concerns, health and fitness, organization, affect control, independence, and moral/religious. Also included is an “other” category for meta-goals and acculturation/language goals. A participant’s goal was content-coded when two of the three raters agreed on its assignment. Raters agreed on 1,187 of 1,356 goals (87.5 % agreement). For the remaining 169 goals, two independent raters classified each goal, and they agreed on 140 of them bringing the consensus rate to 97.9 %. The remaining 29 goals were classified via a roundtable discussion by the authors and research assistants.
We computed a state orientation composite by averaging over the preoccupation and hesitation scale items to include in the multilevel modeling analyses. Separate analyses were run for the preoccupation and hesitation facets. The results were consistent with those for the state orientation composite, although they were somewhat smaller in magnitude. We present the results for the composite variable for sake of parsimony.
Freud’s simple and insightful sentiment toward mental health was the ability “to love and to work” (Erikson 1963, pp. 264–265). It is interesting to see here that the majority of goal conflicts reported by young adults involve these two principal domains of life, and that people struggling with these tasks reported greater levels of depression, anxiety, and psychosomatization.
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Acknowledgments
Michael J. Boudreaux would like to thank Dr. Kate Sweeny for her helpful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.
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A portion of the data reported in this study was described in a poster session at the 2012 annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.
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Boudreaux, M.J., Ozer, D.J. Goal conflict, goal striving, and psychological well-being. Motiv Emot 37, 433–443 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-012-9333-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-012-9333-2