Obviously, having multiple goals makes it harder to achieve any of those goals. The more that people in an organization must coordinate efforts to succeed, the more complicated this becomes. Furthermore, it is possible for multiple goals to contradict each other. If your performance is based on four relatively unrelated goals, how do you meet all four goals equally well?
Based on a literature review, two business professors say that often an organization gives up and nothing changes. They looked at the problem using a computer simulation that modeled various ways to deal with multiple goals in a complex organization (one requiring higher levels of internal coordination). Using a basic method that has become widely used in a range of sciences from genetics and the physical sciences to management science, they applied equations to describe simple versus complex organizations, the number of goals, and three possible strategies:
Performance was defined as accomplishment of each goal without hurting the accomplishment of another goal. As you would expect, the more goals an organization had in the simulation, the less likely it was that each would be achieved. Complex organizations in the model had a harder time than simple ones up to around eight goals, after which simplicity of organization didn't help. Organizations with eight goals consistently failed to achieve 50 percent of them.
Each of the strategies was better for performance than tackling the goals all at once. Handling them by either splitting them up or doing them one at a time was better than focusing the whole company on one, with the sequence approach slightly better than the others at four goals and spreading them around much better at eight goals.
Source: Ethiraj, S., and D. Levinthal (09), "Hoping for A to Z while Rewarding Only A: Complex Organizations and Multiple Goals," Organization Science 20(1):4.
TeamResearch News summarizes the latest information from studies or expert articles on business teams. It is published as a free service of TeamTrainers Consulting.
© 2010 by Jim Morgan. All rights reserved.