Goals are ubiquitous among humans. People use goals as a motivational tool to improve their lives and companies and organizations adopt goals to increase performance, fundraise, and promote customer satisfaction.

“Goals are one of the most accessible and effective tools that we have, as individuals and as managers, to motivate others or ourselves to achieve desired outcomes,” said Jordan Etkin, an associate professor of marketing at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.

But the way we structure our goals can make them more or less effective, Etkin said.

For example, public health officials recommend that adults should do between 150 and 300 minutes of moderate-intensity physical exercise per week — a range goal. Could this be better than suggesting a more specific target — such as ‘aim for at least 300 minutes’?

In the paper “Range goals as dual reference points,” published in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Etkin and Fuqua Ph.D. Scott Wallace of University of Washington studied whether range goals may change our behavioral decisions and affect outcomes any differently than specific goals, such as ‘walk 300 minutes.’

Specific versus range goals

Past research showed that concrete targets are stronger motivators than generic encouragements such as “try as hard as you can.”

“To really get people to work most consistently and effectively or harder, you need to have a specific target,” Etkin said.

If your goal is to walk 10,000 steps per day, it's very clear that 8,000 steps is not enough. “There is no ambiguity in a specific, concrete goal,” she said.

But if specific goals seem to produce better outcomes than ‘do your best’ goals, the researchers wanted to investigate how “range” goals affect human behavior. If instead of 10,000 steps per day, I set out to accomplish between 8,000 and 10,000 steps, will I be more or less motivated to hit the higher target?

The researchers hired about 2,500 participants and ran six studies. In a first group of experiments, they tested how people think about the two endpoints of the range. They predicted that the two targets of the range become more “salient” in people’s mind than any other point within or outside the range.

In one of the studies, they asked 250 participants to solve between 12 and 16 puzzles, and they were told they could continue beyond the upper goal.

They found that on average, people tend to cluster around the two endpoints — 12 and 16 — which suggested that range goals are not used as ambiguous performance targets, but rather “reference points” that shape people’s motivations and self-evaluations.

“They are top-of-mind targets that people can aim for, in response to either internal or external cues,” Etkin said.

In a second group of studies, the researchers then tested whether people flexibly switch between the range targets, and what factors may influence the choice of the lower- or higher-end goal endpoint.

In one experiment, they manipulated the width of the range (“find an error in 5-8 text passages versus 5-12”) which — as expected — increased clustering at the lower endpoint.

In another set of studies, the researchers tested how positive cues and their timing may influence people’s behavior, as well as the impact of external interventions that may provide insights for managers.

In one of these studies, they recruited 400 participants to proofread texts, and assigned a specific goal to one group (find spelling errors in 12 text passages) and a range goal to a second group (find errors in 8-12 passages). The researchers provided positive encouragement at different stages of task completion — one early in the task and a second one later on (close to the lower target of 8 for the range goal group). They found that timing the positive cue before the lower endpoint increased average performance for the range goal group, but decreased performance for the specific goal group.

These findings showed that timing positive cues to occur close to reaching the lower range endpoint encourages goal pursuers to flexibly switch endpoint targets, therefore increasing average performance, Etkin said.

The researchers also found that hard-to-easy tasks — that is, tasks that become easier as they approach the lower range endpoint — have an effect similar to the timing of positive cues. As with cue timing, range goals seemed to outperform comparable specific goals.

Insights for people and managers 

Etkin — a fitness hobbyist who became a certified personal trainer during graduate school — has always tested her goal theories on herself.

“They became a foundational way of how I think about people’s everyday problems,” she said.

Setting goals and tracking progress is the easiest way for people and companies to make changes in their lives and at work, she said.

And range goals can be a valuable tool for achieving desired outcomes, Etkin said, by allowing flexibility that specific goals lack.

This may help build sustained habits.

“Building up a record of success is one of the most essential drivers of sustained motivation and well-being satisfaction," she said.

For managers who want to improve performance, it would be worth considering setting range goals so that the lower endpoint is either right around the specific target they want to achieve, or just a little bit below, Etkin said. The upper endpoint would then be a higher value, achievable but challenging.

“And then let people use the two reference points to manage their motivation," she said. "I think that you'll find that, on average, you might get superior performance compared with a specific goal.”