The interactive effects of task complexity and participation on task performance: A field experiment

Goal-setting investigators have suggested that participation in the goal-setting process may be important for both motivational and cognitive reasons; however, goal-setting research has focused almost exclusively on the motivational aspect of participation, while generally ignoring the cognitive aspect. In an attempt to demonstrate the cognitive implications of participation, a field experiment was conducted with 40 computer programmers writing either a simple or a complex program. Half the participants were actively involved in discussing the project and in jointly determining the completion target, while the other half were simply assigned completion times of equivalent difficulty. It was hypothesized that, for complex programs, individuals participating in the discussion process would outperform individuals having assigned targets of similar difficulty. In contrast, for simple programs, it was expected that participation would have no effect on task performance. The data were analyzed using a 2 × 2 ANOVA procedure, and results strongly supported the hypothesized interaction. Discussion centered on the implications of the findings for future research in this area.