Self-improvement and cooperation: How exchange relationships promote mastery-approach driven individuals' job outcomes

Abstract

In the present research we argue that mastery-approach goals may be beneficial in social achievement contexts because these goals lead to constructive exchange relationship building. An examination of three methodologically complementary studies revealed that mastery-approach goals lead to more cooperative and higher-quality exchange relationships than performance-approach goals and are, ultimately, associated with better job outcomes, as well. The results of a questionnaire study demonstrated that mastery-approach goals are more strongly related to cooperative motives and more weakly related to competitive motives than performance-approach goals. Furthermore, an experimental study indicated that mastery-approach driven individuals show a higher concern for others and are more strongly inclined to cooperate with an exchange partner when engaged in a complex reasoning task than performance-approach driven individuals. Finally, an organizational field study showed that team–member exchange mediates the effect of mastery-approach goals on job performance, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment.

Keywords:

• Achievement goals
• Collaboration
• Exchange relationships
• Job outcomes
• Social motives

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Pascale Le Blanc and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions, Hans Kets and Sanne Prince for their help in data collection, and Jule Epp for proofreading.

Notes

¹A complicating factor in this regard is that quite different operationalizations of achievement goals have been adopted by scholars throughout the achievement goal literature (e.g., Elliot & Murayama, 2008). Consequently, the specific way in which achievement goals have been assessed in research moderates the strength of specific achievement goal-performance outcome relationships (Hulleman et al., 2010).

²In Study 1, we also checked whether gender had main effects, or interacted with dominant achievement goals on the number of cooperative, competitive, and individualistic choices that were made, but this was not the case.

³In Study 2, gender was proportionally distributed among conditions. Gender had no main or interaction effects on the dependent variable and was thus dropped from the analysis.

⁴Age was not reported by one participant, and two participants did not indicate their tenure.