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A growth mindset describes individuals’ beliefs that human traits and abilities are changeable rather than fixed, and has been associated with better learning and performance over time. In a performance management system that uses goals, a growth mindset could be beneficial to the growth and performance of the employee who is motivated by a growth mindset to set and reach for higher performance goals. On the other hand, attaching monetary incentives to achieving these goals, as is often done in organizations, may reduce people’s intrinsic motivation to grow and improve their abilities; instead prompting people to set more achievable performance goals and focus on merely meeting those goals. We conduct an experiment where participants work on multiplication problems to test our predictions that priming a growth mindset will lead to higher goals, effort, and performance in the absence of monetary incentives, but that these effects will be dampened in the presence of monetary incentives. We find marginally positive effects of a growth mindset on goals, effort, and performance in the absence of incentives. Goals are also positively associated with effort, which in turn, is positively associated with performance. Further, we find a significant negative interaction effect between growth mindset and incentives on goals, and a marginally negative interaction effect on effort, consistent with our prediction. The negative interaction effect on performance, while directionally consistent with our prediction, is insignificant. Overall, the results suggest that a growth mindset may benefit performance through its effect on goals, but that positive benefit is dampened when there are goal-based incentives.
Suzanne Mullinnix, AAMVA
Khim Kelly, University of Central Florida
Garrison Nuttall, University of Central Florida