Masters of the long haul: Pursuing longterm ... - Wiley Online Library

Journal of Organizational Behavior, J. Organiz. Behav. 33, 984–1006 (2012) Published online 18 January 2012 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/job.1778

Masters of the long haul: Pursuing long-term work goals THOMAS S. BATEMAN1* AND BRUCE BARRY2 1 2

Summary

McIntire School of Commerce, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, U.S.A. Owen Graduate School of Management, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, U.S.A.

We investigate work motivation in the unstudied domain of individuals who pursue very long-term goals. We highlight the fact that the preponderance of research findings on the psychology of work motivation is based on short-term studies and discuss the potential relevance to long-term motivation of literatures including long-term thinking and time horizons, long-term goals and goal pursuit, and self-regulation. We adopt the qualitative research strategy of theory elaboration, with a specific intention of elaborating goal-setting theory. Analysis of interview data from a unique sample of scientists and others pursuing goals spanning decades or more yielded a structure of psychological factors that can enhance, support, and sustain motivation for the long term. Reconciling our findings with existing goal theories, we develop an integrative model of motivating factors and self-regulation processes underlying long-term goal pursuit. We discuss the implications, including an expanded focus for our field on motivating people for the long run. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Keywords: motivation; goals; goal striving; self-regulation; long-term goals; intrinsic motivation

The all too common case of the great man in management who produces startling economic results as long as he runs the company but leaves behind nothing but a sinking hulk is an example of irresponsible managerial action and of failure to balance present and future. Peter Drucker (Drucker, 1974, p. 43; quoted in Bluedorn, 2002) Five years is the blink of an eye.

Scientist (interview participant)

It is easy to think about the distant future, particularly if only periodically and fleetingly. It is much harder to stay on course and persist in pursuing long-term work goals. The question we address in this research is why and how do people stay motivated in their work when goal accomplishment is at best many years off and may never occur at all? People in contemporary economies seem to know that they should “think long term,” when in fact they base their choices and behaviors primarily or even solely on short-term considerations. Two decades ago, the book Short-term America (Jacobs, 1991) described the phenomenon of managerial behaviors driven by immediate performance pressures and the long-term negative consequences of succumbing to those pressures. Laverty (1996), as well, decried economic “short-termism” in which immediate considerations override long-term factors, yielding decisions that subvert U.S. firms’ competitiveness overseas. In contrast, Hampden-Turner and Trompenaars (2001) extolled the virtues of the constructive “psychology of long-termism” in Asia. But when management academics admonish practitioners to manage with the long term in mind, they have precious little literature from which to draw to provide fuller conceptual understanding or practical advice. *Correspondence to: Thomas S. Bateman, McIntire School of Commerce, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia 22904-4173, U.S.A. E-mail: [email protected]

Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Received 26 January 2010 Revised 25 October 2011, Accepted 7 December 2011

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This domain of behavior is important because many endeavors involving discovery, innovation, the creation of enduring institutions, and other significant achievements require a focused long-term commitment. In business, firm survival may require short-term results; but ideally, managers also pursue courses of action that secure long-term value (e.g., Marginson & McAulay, 2007; Porter, 1992). Some individuals are able to maintain their commitment to long-term goals, persisting over long periods even without accomplishing their goals or obtaining the rewards associated with goal achievement. But motivation research offers little insight into this behavior; the motivational psychology behind long-term pursuits is markedly understudied. We seek to begin filling that gap. This paper reports an investigation of individuals pursuing very long-term work goals to determine how they sustain their motivation. Our goals are to understand the psychological experience of long-term goal pursuit and establish a theoretical foundation for more research in this important arena. Our domain of interest is illustrated by these passages from interviews with study participants, who are pursuing goals with uncertain time horizons but that perhaps are achievable decades or generations down the road: My view of [my work] is that it’s a wonderful long-term goal, [but] not in my lifetime. It has enough risk to be interesting but I am certain enough about it that I am willing to bet. I am optimistic in the long-run: 50 or 100 years. . . it might be tomorrow, but my guess is that it might be the next generation or the second generation after us. When are we going to succeed?. . . I usually say 10 years, but I have been saying that for 10 years. The approach we take in this research is one of theory elaboration, in which pre-existing theoretical concepts drive the design and execution of a qualitative study aimed at inductive model development (Lee, Mitchell, & Sablynski, 1999). The objective of theory elaboration is to craft meaningful conceptual extensions to existing work in an established theoretical domain or paradigm (Strauss & Corbin, 1990; Vaughan, 1992)—in this case, motivation theory broadly and goal theories specifically. Armed with insight into sources of motivation that drive long-term goal pursuit, we can expand on current theoretical perspectives and suggest new avenues for future investigations of work motivation. From here, we organized the paper into four major parts. First, we set the stage for theory elaboration by briefly summarizing existing literature on temporal considerations in management generally and in the psychology of longterm motivation and goal pursuit specifically. Second, we describe our empirical strategy, including the sample, interview protocol, and analytical approach to the data. Third, we present our findings, framing them in terms of conceptual categories (with numerous examples) that emerged from the data analysis and culminating in an integrative model that joins our findings with established goal-setting theory. In the final section, we discuss how the model elaborates goal-setting theory and informs motivation theory generally, extending existing work into potentially fertile new directions. We conclude by acknowledging the limitations of our approach and by offering some practical implications.

Time and Work Motivation Calls for more long-term thinking surfaced in management writing directed at business leaders many years ago, but this emphasis was not accompanied by scholarly research attention to the role of time until recently. Over the last decade or so, the work of Bluedorn and others (e.g., Bluedorn, 2002) has helped make time, in all its manifestations, an important focus for management research. The management literature calling for more consideration of the role of time (e.g., Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

J. Organiz. Behav. 33, 984–1006 (2012) DOI: 10.1002/job

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T. S. BATEMAN AND B. BARRY

George & Jones, 2000; Zaheer, Albert, & Zaheer, 1999) includes special issues of Academy of Management Review (Goodman, Lawrence, Ancona, & Tushman, 2001) and Academy of Management Journal (Barkema, Baum, & Mannix, 2002). In the realm of motivation specifically, leading scholars have suggested orienting research toward an examination of persistence in goal pursuit (Mitchell & Daniels, 2003; Sansone & Thoman, 2006), which inescapably factors into the study of very long-term motivation. To locate our study within the broader context of temporality, we briefly discuss here two relevant strands of literature: long-term thinking and time horizons generally, and then long-term goals and goal pursuit more specifically, including the role of self-regulation in long-term goal striving.

Long-term thinking and time horizons We surmise that most people living in modern societies regard perhaps a five-year plan and more certainly a 10- or 20-year plan as a long-term endeavor. Even so, there are examples of social systems where “long term” is measured not in decades but in generations or centuries. The Iroquois, for instance, considered the impact of their decisions as much as seven generations ahead (Bluedorn, 2002). Matsushita founder and CEO Konosuke Matsushita in 1932 famously presented a corporate plan that covered 250 years, and the Dutch have a 200-year plan for adapting to climate change (Hertsgaard, 2011). But most research in organizational behavior focuses strictly on the short term; issues of temporality are considered only peripherally (see Fried & Slowik, 2004, and Steel & Konig, 2006, for exceptions) or sidestepped entirely (George & Jones, 2000). Longer term behavioral consequences have been analyzed by psychologists studying children by using delayed gratification paradigms (e.g., Mischel, Shoda, & Rodriguez, 1989) and by experimental economists applying utility functions (e.g., Loewenstein, Read, & Baumeister, 2003) but not to our knowledge by management researchers studying working adults and broader arrays of motivational constructs. Nonetheless, some authors have noted the potential advantages of long-term focus in task performance. Baumeister and Vohs (2003) describe the adaptive benefits of delayed gratification and self-regulation; these capacities presumably provided competitive advantage for survival and reproduction. A long-term perspective may aid problem solving: “There are problems that are impossible if you think about them in two-year terms—which everyone does—but they’re easy if you think in fifty-year terms” (Hillis, quoted in Brand, 1999, p. 157). Earlier research linked long-term orientation to a number of other social psychological actions and outcomes, including achievement (e.g., Raynor, 1978). At a more macro level, organization theorists (e.g., Collins & Porras, 1996; Cyert & March, 1963; Ouchi, 1981) state or imply that longer time horizons can improve organizational performance, but Bluedorn (2002) noted the lack of clear research findings on this issue.

Long-term goals and goal pursuit Theories of motivation grounded in principles of reinforcement, expectancy, and job design point to the advantages of short time-lags between behavior and reinforcements or feedback. But the specific challenge of sustaining motivation for long periods in the absence of near-term reinforcement is a different matter, one that directs our conceptual attention to the pursuit of long-term work goals. Goal-setting theory (Locke & Latham, 1990) is an especially powerful and robust theory of work motivation (Miner, 2005). When people are committed to goals, they focus attention on those goals, exert effort, develop strategies, and persist in pursuit of their objective (Locke & Latham, 1990). This study elaborates on this classic and well-validated theory by focusing on long-term persistence in pursuit of long-term goals—a notably understudied phenomenon. Goals can be very specific, such as the performance objectives in goal-setting experiments, but are conceptualized much more broadly as internal representations of desired states (Austin & Vancouver, 1996). Historically, social psychologist Kurt Lewin (1935) linked future and present by describing how people’s representations of the future, Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.



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in the form of goals, affect current behavior; this premise has been highly influential in many subsequent theories (e.g., Bandura, 1986; Beach, 1990; Locke & Latham, 1990). Imagining hypothetical future events and outcomes is thought to affect subsequent behavior including persistence in task pursuit (Johnson & Sherman, 1990). Copious research evidence supports the proposition that specific, challenging, and attainable performance goals are powerful motivators in the short run and that lack of immediate reinforcement often extinguishes behavior (e.g., Locke & Latham, 1990, 2004). We also know that short-term, proximal goals tend to capture people’s attention and motivate behavior more powerfully than do long-term, distal goals (e.g., Karniol & Ross, 1996; Liberman & Trope, 2003). The question driving our study—the theoretical elaboration we are attempting—is how goal pursuit is cultivated and maintained in the very long run. In theory elaboration, existing or guiding theory is “an analytic framework that opens possibilities at the same time as it focuses research” (Vaughan, 1996, p. 457). We summarize the analytic framework that guided and focused our research strategy in two ways. First, regarding temporality, goals can be proximal or distal (Kanfer & Ackerman, 2000). Goals usually reflect a “positive time preference” in that goals with immediate outcomes exert more motivational influence than distal goals (Karniol & Ross, 2005). Long-term goals often receive discounted value (and perhaps have lower associated expectancies; Liberman & Trope, 2003) and tend to exert less influence on immediate behavior. Proximal goals also can be more motivating because they enable people to assess their progress (Bandura, 1997). Long-term goal striving may be aided by more proximal subgoals (Locke & Latham, 1990); accordingly, short-term goals are apt to figure prominently within a model of long-term goal pursuit. Second, a process that appears to be a key to maintaining behavior over the long term is self-regulation (Bandura, 1997). In its most general sense, self-regulation is the “capacity to guide one’s activities over time and across changing circumstances” (Diefendorff & Lord, 2008, p. 153). In the work motivation literature, self-regulation theories have at their core a joint concern with goals and feedback in relation to those goals (Latham & Locke, 1991; Latham & Pinder, 2005), as well as processes involved in maintaining and attaining goals, including making modifications to behaviors and cognitions (Lord, Diefendorff, Schmidt, & Hall, 2010; Vancouver & Day, 2005). Effective self-regulation is associated with physical and psychological well-being, as well as better job performance (Kuhl, Kazén, & Koole, 2006). Self-regulatory breakdowns undermine the pursuit and attainment of long-term goals. Accordingly, we anticipated that evidence of self-regulatory processes would surface in our interviews with individuals pursuing very long-term goals. Although the study reported here is not an explicit or hypothesis-driven test of dispositional approaches to time (e.g., Zimbardo & Boyd, 1999), the relative effects of proximal versus distal goals, or self-regulatory processes, these literatures do provide a conceptually relevant foundation for understanding long-term goal pursuit. We expected that exploring the phenomenology and subjective quality of the experience of long-term goal pursuit would hold the most potential to generate new information, constructs, and insights about the psychological underpinnings of this understudied work behavior. Decades ago, Locke and Latham (1990) suggested the need to study goals via a wide range of time spans, from minutes to weeks. Although weeks is a long time in goal-setting research, the study described next was designed to elaborate goal theories built upon short-term studies by investigating people pursuing goals of uncertain time horizon but that are perceived as decades-long and more.

Methods Approach Qualitative methods are especially useful in studies exploring questions about how experience is given meaning (Gephart, 2004). We gathered data through semi-structured interviews with a unique sample of individuals pursuing extremely long-term goals. We intended and designed the interview protocol to explore the psychology of participants’ motivation by tapping the unexplored terrain of their constructions and accounts (Dutton & Dukerich, 1991; Gersick, Bartunek, & Dutton, 2000; Isabella, 1990) of their very long-term goal pursuits. This approach is appropriate to the Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


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research aims at hand; it also is consistent with Locke and Latham’s (2004) recommendation that future research into work motivation uses introspection as a primary method, in part because motivational states exist in consciousness. Introspection, accordingly, is a useful way to identify and understand the important psychological constructs. As mentioned earlier, the qualitative research strategy of theory elaboration (Lee et al., 1999; Vaughan, 1992) guided our approach to identify psychological factors that can enhance, support, and sustain motivation for the long term. Theory elaboration shares some common cause with grounded theory development (Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Strauss & Corbin, 1990) in that both aim to advance theory through an “interplay between analysis and data collection” (Strauss & Corbin, 1990, p. 273), and both may advance theory through the development of hierarchical structures of conceptual categories. The difference between the two approaches lies in the distinction between theory advancement that is generative as opposed to elaborative. The former refers to the initial generation of new theory from the data, and the latter—our approach here, particularly with respect to goal pursuit and self-regulation—refers to the elaboration of existing theories (Strauss & Corbin, 1990).

Sample We interviewed 25 individuals whose professional work epitomized goal striving to achieve work-related goals with very lengthy time horizons. Their work involved goal pursuit having three characteristics: (i) eventual (possible) success that could be many years, decades, or generations down the road; (ii) very slow, if any, real progress; and (iii) significant chance of failure. Although some participants expressed certainty and others uncertainty regarding ultimate goal accomplishment, objectively the goal pursuit was characterized by high uncertainty regarding whether primary goals would eventually be accomplished, in part because time delays virtually guarantee uncertainty (Laverty, 1996; Prelec & Loewenstein, 1991). Our sampling was by necessity purposive and selective rather than random (Miles & Huberman, 1994). The participants we chose to contact and interview all were suitable for illuminating and extending our knowledge of this unstudied domain (Eisenhardt & Graebner, 2007). We sought and selected participants who by virtue of their unique experience or perspective could serve as revelatory (Dick, 2006; Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Yin, 2009). A natural hazard in interview-based research is the prospect that respondents will privilege impression management over accurate recollection and candid appraisal. To minimize this risk of “retrospective sensemaking by imageconscious participants,” Eisenhardt and Graebner (2007, p. 28) counsel the cultivation of a pool of interviewees who are diverse and highly knowledgeable. Our participants came from different organizational levels, professions, functional areas, groups, geographies, and multiple organizations. We sampled with the goal of learning from people engaged in various long-term pursuits about the phenomenology of their work, rather than to compare predetermined subsamples or contextual factors. Our participants (with two relevant and useful exceptions, described in the succeeding sections) were directly involved in such long-term pursuits as a core work activity, and all were professionals working in knowledge-based organizations in the United States. Participants worked in fields including biomedical science, nanotechnology, astronomy (specifically, the study of the nature and prevalence of life in the universe), biodiversity, and the creation of a cultural institution devoted to the long-term goal of persuading society to think and behave in ways that prioritize the long term over the short term. Participants ranged in age from 24 to 60 years with a median age of 50. The length of tenure in their current organizational affiliations ranged from 1 to 27 years, with a median tenure of 6 years (most had worked in their fields substantially longer than the time in their present projects or positions). We interviewed primarily scientists and technical specialists working on research projects (n = 16), some administrators and organizational board members (n = 5) supporting long-term endeavors, and a few individuals occupying both scientific and administrative roles (n = 4). Some scientists, engineers, and managers were members of the same organizations (eight, occupying a variety of different roles, within one independent research organization, and six similarly diverse employees of another); others were academics working in a variety of fields in different universities. A few respondents were social scientists working toward the distal goal of inspiring individuals, governments, and other organizations to think with longer time horizons Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.



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and make decisions accordingly. Thus, these participants were both engaged in long-term goal pursuit and engaged intellectually in trying to understand it and to motivate it in others. We interviewed two individuals—a hedge fund founder and a partner in a prestigious Wall Street firm— whose work environments are characterized by intense short-term pressure but who attempt to think and behave in ways that are longer term. The hedge fund founder and the Wall Street partner were unique in the sample by virtue of their high-pressure work environments but were relevant and useful by virtue of being long-term thinkers relative to others in their industry. The hedge fund founder predicted (prior to the 2008 economic crisis) that a “hedge fund shakeout will happen because so many new funds think short term that they never generate any real performance” and noted among other things that “To think long term by nature means you are willing to [withstand] the valley to get to the mountain. [Most] people are not willing to take that risk.” The Wall Street partner was informative because her firm’s compensation system was not commission-book based, and since becoming a partner, she was able to turn more of her attention to longer-term goals and contrast this work with her previous daily goal pursuits.

Interviews The interviews were semi-structured, with most lasting between 60 and 75 min (a few went longer). We conducted all interviews in person by one or both of the authors and recorded and transcribed the data (with each interviewee’s permission). On the basis of our interest in the psychology of long-term goal pursuit including self-regulation, the interview protocol included these categories of questions: goals (e.g., “Can you summarize in one sentence the ultimate goal you are pursuing?”), motivation (e.g., “What is it that makes you suited to this? What have you gotten out of this pursuit? What are the sources of satisfaction in your work?”), perspective on the future (e.g., “How long do you predict you will stay in this field? Is it your life’s work?”), persistence (e.g., “To outsiders, it appears that progress is very slow or even nonexistent—how do you stay motivated? Why do you continue doing what you do?”), work context (e.g., “What is the nature of the community in which you operate? How would you say it is viewed in the larger scientific/professional community?”), and bio-descriptive (e.g., “How did you come to pursue this line of work?”). Each category contained multiple possible questions. We initiated all question categories, although some interviews at times strayed from specific questions and into other areas as the nature and flow of the conversation dictated. Thus, in each interview, we covered all categories of questions, but some questions were idiosyncratic on the basis of the need for clarification and detail, especially as potentially interesting and instructive new directions arose. As such, we used this semi-structured interview strategy to generate a consistent baseline of topical coverage and as a flexible strategy of discovery (Berg, 1995; Van Maanen, Sorensen, & Mitchell, 2007). Often, we allowed participants to speak at length, uninterrupted.

Analysis In keeping with the concept of interplay between data collection and theorization that is the hallmark of grounded theory development and elaboration (Strauss & Corbin, 1990), analysis began while interviews were still ongoing. Specifically, we commenced review of transcripts and interpretation of qualitative data after roughly half the eventual total number of interviews had been completed and transcribed, even as the process of scheduling and conducting interviews continued. Analysis and interpretation proceeded through four phases (e.g., Corley & Gioia, 2004; Pratt, Rockmann, & Kaufmann, 2006). The first phase involved the identification of interviewee comments potentially relevant to work motivation. To accomplish this, we separately examined all transcribed interviews, and we each independently generated a complete set of statements from which to identify initial (provisional) concepts in the data. We reconciled these Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


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separate sets of highlighted passages to eliminate redundancies and, for passages both of us identified, to ensure we agreed on the parsing of comments into discrete passages. We then transferred each highlighted passage to an index card; the number of cards created ultimately totaled approximately 1000. A result of parsing interviewee comments into distinct notions of motivation or goal striving is that units of data tended to be quite brief: the overwhelming preponderance (>90 per cent) of passages transferred to cards for the next analytic phase were fragments (phrases) or single sentences. In the second phase of analysis, our objective was to group relevant interviewee comments into first-order categories via open coding. To accomplish this, we worked with the reconciled list of passages (cards) generated in the first phase. First, working separately, we each created a provisional set of categories that captured motivational themes found in the passages. We allowed these first-order construct categories to emerge naturally from our readings of and discussions about the interview transcripts themselves, rather than being directed or constrained by particular theories, taxonomies, or assumptions. As we began to settle on specific categories for further analysis, we were constantly comparing categories with one another to ensure that they were meaningfully distinct and to assess the fit of specific interviewee passages within categories to ensure that they cohered meaningfully. A good deal of the work of qualitative data coding in grounded theory research involves these kinds of comparative methods: the researcher “compares data with data, data with categories, and category with category” (Charmaz, 2005, p. 517). Early in this phase of the analysis, we were working with as many as 45 first-order coding categories. As the process of comparison, reconciliation, and discussion proceeded, we ultimately arrived at a list of 24 first-order concepts. We list these 24 concepts in the left-most column of Figure 1. The third phase of analysis involved searching for commonalities and relationships among the first-order concepts to assemble them into second-order themes (axial coding) and ultimately into overarching dimensions to create a more coherent story for the complete data set. Logistically, the process by which this occurred was similar to the prior phase. As we discussed and refined them, we ultimately converged on a set of eight second-order themes (shown in the second column of Figure 1). In doing so, we returned frequently to the first-order categories within each theme to reconfirm the concepts or make minor adjustments. The initial sensemaking of the data (into 24 first-order categories) was by design driven by the data itself, not by prior theoretical conceptions or existing constructs in the motivation literature. Given the objective of theory elaboration, however, we did consciously take into account theoretical accounts of motivation and goal setting as we worked to identify second-order themes. We assessed the reliability of our associations of interview comments with thematic categories in the following way. We (the two authors) agreed on the placement of each of 80 interview comments, chosen to represent a wide range of themes and underlying first-order concepts into one of the eight second-order themes. Subsequently, two doctoral students uninvolved in and unfamiliar with this research received training in the meaning of our themes and concepts, coded practice examples until comfortable with the categories and the task, and then independently coded the same 80 interview comments. We were primarily interested in intercoder reliability on the eight second-order themes, but we did also ask coders to select a first-order concept (24 in all, as shown in Figure 1) within the selected theme. We evaluated reliability by calculating values of kappa (Cohen, 1960), which is the appropriate index of rater agreement when nominal (rather than ordinal) categories are involved. In the first of two reliability tests, we found that the two coders agreed 72 per cent of the time, yielding a value for kappa of 0.70 (p < .0001). Values for kappa above 0.60 represent “substantial” agreement (Landis & Koch, 1977, p. 165). The two coders discussed and reached consensus on a theme for each of the cases where they did not agree in their initial independent coding. (In the cases where coders’ independent judgments on a theme matched, they also chose the same underlying first-order concept 86 per cent of the time.) The second reliability test assessed agreement on the 80 coding decisions between the coders’ consensus judgments and our (the authors) previous judgments. Coders agreed with the authors in 85 per cent of cases, yielding a value for kappa of 0.83 (p < .0001); kappa values above 0.80 represent “almost perfect” agreement (Landis & Koch, 1977, p. 165). At least one of the two coders agreed with the authors’ category judgments in 90 per cent of cases. Taken as a whole, these analyses point to the presence of high reliability in judgments associating interview comments with motivational themes. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.



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Figure 1. Structure of content categories arising from interview data

In the fourth and final phase, we considered and discussed similarities and differences among the eight secondorder themes. Doing so led us to converge on four aggregate dimensions, shown in the third column of Figure 1. As in previous phases, “convergence” is shorthand for the result of an extensive iterative process involving both authors engaged in independent data review, consultation of relevant existing research literature, and joint conversation and deliberation leading to agreement. The substantive nature and theoretical value of these motivational themes and aggregate dimensions will be discussed in the Findings section. The process of conducting interviews and coding and analyzing transcript data (as described in the succeeding texts) continued until new themes and categories no longer emerged and further interviews added little new information, insight, or refinement. When additional interview data cease to add novel insight or further refine constructs under study, researchers are said to have reached a point of theoretical saturation (Auerbach & Silverstein, 2003). In inductive qualitative analysis involving the identification of categories and hierarchies, theoretical saturation occurs when researchers find they are no longer discovering new categories or relations between categories (Bernard & Ryan, 2010, p. 284). Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


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Findings The process used to merge the 24 first-order concepts into a smaller set of broader factors resulted in the identification of eight more general (second-order) motivating themes: (i) allegories; (ii) futurity; (iii) self; (iv) singularity; (v) knowledge; (vi) the work; (vii) embeddedness; and (viii) progress. Table 1 shows the eight second-order themes, with descriptions and illustrative quotations from the interview data. For each theme in the table, in the second column, we show first a definition of the theme and then present a description of its apparent motivational impact on long-term goal pursuit. To elaborate one theme as an example, allegories, including metaphors, analogies, and historical references, are figurative treatments or representations of abstractions that serve the purpose of making some kind of consequential meaning for the person who constructs or invokes the representation. We discerned the use of allegory by study participants who invoked symbolic, metaphorical, historical, or iconic references as a way to lend a kind of noble (and hence motivating) quality to their long-term goal pursuit. Examples include iconic comparisons with the Wild West, Galileo, the methodical work pace of New Guineans, and Christopher Columbus, three days out of port and slowly raising the crow’s nest. Participants said, “We’re all part of a string,” “standing on people’s shoulders,” and asked “Why does a painter paint?”; referenced the Star of the East and the world’s biggest carrot; and drew analogies to the soldier, poet, physicist, entrepreneur, scientist, philosopher, and alchemist. As research on transformational leadership reveals, symbolic and metaphorical references focus attention on task performance and desired outcomes by creating mental images and evoking emotion (Bass, 1985; Densten, 2002), and also by arousing notions of collective identity among followers (Shamir, House, & Arthur, 1993).

Aggregate dimensions Figure 1, introduced earlier, shows the complete structure of constructs that were adduced from the data—the 24 firstorder categories, the eight second-order themes, and the aggregate dimensions. The aggregate dimensions arose from consideration by the authors of similarities and differences among the eight themes. Consistent with motivation research showing interplay between shorter-term and longer-term goals (Kanfer & Ackerman, 2000; Karniol & Ross, 2005; Locke & Latham, 1990), the eight themes point in some ways to distal (longer term) sources of motivation and in other ways to proximal (near-term) motivational influences. We discerned that distal sources of motivation tend to take one of two forms. First, some distal influences are oriented toward the realization of societal or other broader impacts and outcomes beyond the personal benefits derived from goal accomplishment; we label these “possible futures” in Figure 1. Other distal influences highlight the possible achievement of new personal or professional states of existence as a result of goal pursuit—“possible selves” (Markus & Nurius, 1986). Possible futures and possible selves can implicate a variety of cognitive processes (considering positive and negative consequences, assessing probabilities, making choices and plans, and so on) that incite and direct goalrelated action. Imagining various futures and their consequences, then, people apply strategies to achieve their goals (Karniol & Ross, 1996). We further discerned that second-order themes arising from the data appear to underpin two more proximal sources of motivation. First, some task behaviors and perceptions catalyze motivation by stimulating interest in the day-to-day work conducted in the pursuit of long-term goals—we label this dimension “task interest.” Other actions and perceptions catalyze motivation through the specific short-term outcomes they generate on the way to long-term goal achievement—we label these “near-term gratifications.” Thus, whereas distal possibilities occur in the psychological here and now, their actual accomplishment is uncertain and lies (only potentially) in the distant future. Proximal sources of motivation also occur in the here and now, not only psychologically but also in actuality, from task engagement and near-term outcomes. All four of these dimensions, whether distal or proximal, are nonetheless similar in that they all (i) can exist psychologically in the present; (ii) potentially provide psychological Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.



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Table 1. Eight motivational themes emerging from data analysis. Theme

Description and motivational source

Representative quotes

Allegory

Figurative representations or abstractions that serve the purpose of offering significant, consequential meaning for the individual Lends a kind of noble or symbolizing (and hence motivating) quality to long-term goal pursuit

We’re all standing on each other’s shoulders. We’re doing it the same way Darwin did. Wright brothers. Moon landings.

Futurity

Allusions to long-term impact and possibilities associated with goal attainment, including references to the generativity of the work Locates motivation in ultimate outcomes that may result from realization of the long-term goal

It’s a kind of willingness or desire to say “what if.” The more things that we learn. . . the more enticing the possibilities become. The stage is set and my children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren will ultimately know the answer.

Self

Statements that invoke personal identity, reputation, or personal belief systems Grounds motivation in the individual’s real or desired self-perception and self-concept

[It is] a way for me to express my creativity. You’re looked at as a risk taker and a leader and I enjoy that. I would feel like a real idiot if I had the means to explore something and didn’t.

Singularity

References to the perceived uniqueness of the endeavor Motivation arises from special responsibilities, opportunities, or personal qualifications associated with the pursuit of this particular long-term goal

Do keep in mind that the number of people who do this full time is very, very small. . . dozens of people worldwide. It’s something that is romantically appealing. . . this big exploration that nobody could have done before. [It is an] opportunity denied in all the previous generations of humans.

Knowledge

Statements that refer to skill development, new understanding, acquiring truth, and finding ways to control events Motivation arises from fundamental processes of discovery and learning associated with goal pursuit

One type of result. . . is realizing you’ve got the solution, or the explanation. Any truth is good compared to not knowing it, and worth the risk. As long as every day I’m learning things, I’m happy.

The work

Allusions to the nature of the work itself, including task challenges, methods used, risk and uncertainties, and elements that are fun or surprising Motivation arises from appealing aspects of engaging in work tasks and from the challenges posted by those tasks

If it wasn’t complex, it wouldn’t be fun. It’s like a puzzle that you’re solving. . . move through the steps at the right time and synchronize everything so that it works. No way in a million years that I would ever regret it. No, that is impossible to envision. It has just been too much fun.

Embeddedness

Ways in which individuals see their work and their motivation as situated within social contexts consisting of colleagues and critics, as well as ways in which their work garners social legitimacy within their professions and in society Motivation arises from connections with or responses to organizational or professional communities or perceptions of legitimacy rooted in those communities or society

I would rather flip burgers with people that I respect and like than do a very incredible job with a bunch of people I hate and don’t respect. I will really enjoy disproving the skeptics. It is very important for us to be thought of as a mainstream enterprise. We do not want to be characterized as the Howard Hughes of science.

Progress

Statements that emphasize the notion of forward movement (often short term) in the direction of longterm goal pursuit Motivation arises from subgoal attainment, advancements in tools and techniques that facilitate the work, or other forms of proximal and incremental accomplishments or impact

As long as there is some sort of forward motion, of new people coming in, new ideas coming in, something happening. . . then I would consider that as successful. We’ve created a set of on-line tools that can go on and be used for many other things. You get a new technology idea and you get it. . . defended, tested, and proven and in the field working. That is great incremental success and you feel like you’re striving forward.



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sustenance at any time during long-term task pursuit; and (iii) potentially can supplement, complement, or substitute for one another in terms of motivational impact. Each second-order theme arguably can contribute to several or even perhaps all of the aggregate dimensions. For illustrative purposes, in Figure 1, we show a sample of possible linkages that each author derived independently and then were easily agreed upon in conversation as justifiably plausible and clear. These linkages can be read as provisional, testable ideas describing psychological influences on long-term motivation. We propose that some constructs (e.g., singularity and knowledge) are most likely to motivate both proximally and distally, whereas others (e.g., allegory and embeddedness) are perhaps likely to exert their influence on motivation more through one (proximal versus distal) than the other. As examples, we provide here one relationship and a quote for each of the four aggregate dimensions. We propose that perceptions of possible futures—a distal motivating influence—are activated by uses of allegory and invocations of futurity on the part of individuals pursuing long-term goals. This could involve the invocation of a metaphor to describe one’s work and the linkage of that metaphor with excitement about a long-term vision or possibility, as in this remark by an interviewee: You know the old west was a kind of frontier—New Mexico, the Pacific northwest, were all these strange and not very well explored provinces and territories. The same is true in astronomy. . . it’s like right here in this century we’re opening the windows on the universe. Motivation grounded in developing aspects of possible selves is proposed in Figure 1 to be related to themes of self, singularity, and knowledge. A study participant connected singularity (perceptions of the unique, pioneering nature of the work) to the way that this opportunity dictates a particular conception of self: If it wasn’t as pioneering then it would become uninteresting to me. . . I want to do something that’s needed. . . I don’t want to just get by. I want to try to push the envelope, I want to be one of those heroes that try to pull things forward. . . I don’t just want to be a soldier. Task interest as a motivating force is generated by multiple aspects of long-term goal pursuit, among them the role of knowledge acquisition as part of the pursuit: “The more you learn, the more interesting it gets.” Finally, multiple aspects of the experience of long-term goal pursuit are implicated in the generation of near-term sources of gratification. This comment from an interviewee links the theme of embeddedness (reactions and input from peers) with gratification (success and rewards in the short run): It’s a very satisfying thing to solve a little piece of the problem and drop it into place and then listing the repercussions and then the phone rings: I read your paper on [X], I have a question. Then it [moves] in a new direction. It’s very rewarding short-term. It bears emphasizing that these examples represent only a subset of the conceptually plausible linkages between motivation themes and aggregate dimension. Nonetheless, because goal-setting research has not considered motivational influences on goal pursuit beyond a few weeks or months, relationships such as these if empirically supported will shed new light on how goal-setting theory can capitalize on work perceptions that are unique to long-term goals. We will elaborate further on research opportunities suggested by our findings and these propositions in the Discussion section.

Self-regulation Throughout the identification of the content and structure of motivating constructs in the data, we encountered recurring references to the process of self-regulation. Examples of self-regulation appeared throughout the transcripts and across multiple thematic categories; self-regulation is clearly a process that is potentially applicable across content domains. Therefore, we did not identify self-regulation as one of the eight distinct content themes contributing to long-term Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.



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motivation. Rather, we saw it as an overarching process and set of strategies implicated in many of the motivating themes identified in our analysis. Self-regulation both contributes to these motivating constructs and is, in turn, influenced by them. We highlight six forms of self-regulation that arose in interviews; Table 2 summarizes and illustrates these mechanisms. We noted earlier that a performance goal and feedback form the core of self-regulation (Latham & Locke, 1991). Our interviewees described the operation not of a single performance goal but of a goal portfolio—an explicit and implicit set of multiple goals, across multiple content themes, that included both short-term and long-term goals. As one interviewee puts it, “The ultimate goal is to have a civilization that runs at civilization speed and scale. . . [a] more immediate goal is to assist civilization to do that.” Just as participants recognized multiple goals, they also experienced a feedback portfolio with different forms of feedback including perceived progress and other short-term gratifications. These perceptions, combined with interviewee observations that illustrate the self and singularity factors, correspond with and highlight the three motives or goals for seeking feedback identified by Ashford and Black (1996): instrumental (e.g., “You gain gratification out of that because you are doing your work properly and your system is working”), ego based (e.g., [the feedback tells me] “I’m good at electronics, I’m good at computing technology”), and image based (e.g., “You get credit as a far-sighted individual, as an adventurer”). Further, in the domain of self-regulation, interviewees’ comments provided evidence supporting Kuhl’s (2000a, 2000b) action control strategies, including attention control, motivation control, emotion control, and coping with failure. Attention control strategies are those that maintain focus on the uncompleted action rather than on distractions (e.g., from our data: “The thing that captures my attention most is the end goal, the vision of it, because that is the thing that gets me going”). Motivation control strategies enhance the attractiveness of an intended action (e.g., “You feel that you’re part of the great big space ship going through the big cosmos and it’s all functioning together and some day you really will discover something”). Emotion control strategies involve disengaging from moods that Table 2. Self-regulation processes observed in the data. Process

Description

Example

Goal portfolio

Presence of multiple goals, including a mix of shortterm and long-term goals

You really feel a long-term connection to the project because you know you’re working for this ultimate goal. But we actually have so many short-term goals that it is very hard to think about that long-term goal. . . it’s not something that’s right at the top level all the time.

Feedback portfolio

Reception over time of various forms of feedback, including progress and other short-term gratifications

Progress is getting over all those obstacles to doing the work. Without a doubt there are incremental successes in all kinds of ways.

Attention controla

Maintenance of focus on goal-directed actions that are not completed rather than attending to distractions

When I get down about the day-to-day I think about the longer term and see that it is really going to be useful. . . It’s all coming together and it’s very clear where it’s leading. . . There it is, a forest. I’m not just digging in the dirt here.

Motivation control

Strategies that elevate the attractiveness of intended action in pursuit of the goal

It was worth doing the risky inspiring thing as opposed to doing the safe civil service thing.

Emotion control

Diminishing or disengaging from emotions or mood states that make enactment of an intention more difficult or substituting one emotion for another to facilitate intention

[In order to keep your sanity] you should always find amusement in what you’re working on and you should always make it as game-like as possible.

Coping with failure

Using failure as a basis for improvement rather than allowing self to be emotionally injured by it

If we can learn the maximum amount from every failure then I think we will still succeed and no one will be unhappy with that.

a

This and the remaining processes are from Kuhl (2000a).



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render difficult the enactment of an intention or otherwise regulating emotions in a way that facilitates one’s intentions (e.g., “It means realizing that your emotions are always laying traps. Knowing that there will be good times and bad”). Coping with failure refers to the individual’s ability to capitalize on failure constructively—“using failure for improvement rather than being overridden by it” (Kuhl, 2000b, p. 673) (e.g., “I tend to look at a negative result as we just need another way to do it or another kind of control in the experiment”).

Extrinsic rewards It may not seem particularly revealing to note what is not in the data; “lack of evidence is not evidence of absence,” as one interviewee observed in relation to the null results in his own long-term pursuit. But it is noteworthy that extrinsic motivation in the form of financial rewards is underrepresented in the transcripts. Certainly, it would be naive and erroneous, in light of casual observation and decades of research on rewards and motivation, to infer that financial incentives are inoperative in long-term goal pursuit. And generally speaking, no doubt both extrinsic and intrinsic rewards were operative. One interviewee told us, “You would not do [this work] if it was not for that big carrot and there is no doubt about that. . . but that is not what gets you out of bed in the mornings.” But if the big carrots (e.g., major discoveries, honors) matter, it also does seem clear that financial rewards were not the dominant influence in the long-term motivation of most of our participants. Participants indicated in compelling ways that intrinsic rewards were more important than financial payoffs. “Everybody here could double their salary by walking across the hall and joining one of these startups,” said one interviewee. Another observed, “You do not get a lot of money, but you get an enormous amount of psychic income.” Some participants did cite psychological rewards that are extrinsic to the task but are social or professional rather than pecuniary: “What I dream about are the payoffs: proof in knowing, convincing your colleagues, and knowing for certain that you were right all along.” These may not be objective assessments, of course. Still, our interview protocol afforded participants ample opportunity to comment on any and all forms of rewards and outcomes experienced in their work; on balance and across interviews, intrinsic rewards were far more frequently and more emphatically invoked than extrinsic rewards.

An inductive model of long-term work motivation Figure 2 displays a model of long-term motivation that combines our findings with established motivational constructs from literatures on goal setting and self-regulation. The model’s starting point is acceptance of a particular and unique type of goal, one for which potential goal accomplishment lies much further in the future than for the goals typically studied in goal-setting research. The focal outcome is persistence in long-term goal pursuit. In broad terms, the model elaborates goal-setting theory by identifying psychological constructs and self-regulatory processes as means for maintaining goal pursuit over very long periods. More specifically, the figure shows that accepting a long-term goal initiates the process, prompting arousal, attention, direction, initial effort, and short-term persistence as specified by goal-setting theory (Locke & Latham, 2002). In the (shaded) center of the figure, we theorize relationships among the major constructs developed in our data and discussed thus far. These include the eight motivational themes that emerged from interview data, the distinction between distal and proximal motivating processes that we induced as dimensions capturing those themes, and the array of self-regulation processes that we observed in the transcripts. As discussed earlier and shown in the figure, we propose that some motivational themes catalyze primarily one or the other of the two dimensions (distal or proximal), whereas at least some and perhaps many themes (e.g., singularity and knowledge) are presumed to work as motivational influences through both dimensions. We position self-regulation processes in reciprocal relation to the distal and proximal dimensions because it seems likely that the motivational influences we surfaced in our interviews are both causes and consequences of self-regulation. For example, personal goals such as possible selves or learning (a form of Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.



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Figure 2. Integrative model of long-term goal pursuit

near-term gratification) prompt self-regulation toward achieving those goals, and self-regulation strategies and tactics enhance goal pursuit (e.g., Vancouver, 2000). By embedding the conceptual product of our study—the shaded part of the figure—within a linear progression that connects established goal-setting mechanisms with the object of our inquiry, long-term goal persistence, we are making two conceptual arguments. First, we distinguish initial effort and short-term persistence from persistence in longer-term goal pursuit, contending that the latter is more than just an extended version of the former. Second, we argue that behavior maintenance and continued goal striving arise when various sources of information provide psychological sustenance by triggering the constructs that emerged from the data analysis. Those constructs, which stimulate and perpetuate long-run motivation, represent a complex set of cognitive and affective phenomena that implicate perceptions of self, the future, task activities, and a variety of other gratifications. Successful long-term goal persistence (by which we mean successful ongoing pursuit, not necessarily goal attainment) is theorized as the product of interplay among psychological sources of both proximal and distal motivation and multiple modes of effective self-regulation behavior. We turn next to the implications of the model for motivation theory and practice.

Discussion Our primary intended contributions were to engage in theory elaboration—especially with respect to goal setting—and to bring attention to an important but understudied behavioral domain, that of long-term goal pursuit. Our findings suggest additions to our field’s perspective on goals and goal striving and indicate the possibilities of self-regulating long-term motivation. Our results also illustrate the learning potential afforded by studying unconventional domains (Bamberger & Pratt, 2010) and individuals, groups, organizations, and pursuits that exemplify goal strivings and accomplishments well beyond the norm. The model in Figure 2 synthesizes our contribution, which is to say the ways in which goal-setting theory is elaborated by our findings. In the succeeding sections, we discuss our theoretical contributions regarding goals and goal Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


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pursuit, including motivation content themes (proximal and distal) and self-regulation processes, and suggest avenues for research that would further validate and develop the contribution. After that, we acknowledge some study limitations, identify directions for future research on long-term work motivation that move beyond the proposed model, and consider implications for practice.

Theoretical contributions Our identification of the eight motivating content themes brings new perspectives to the literature on goal setting and goal pursuit. To be sure, some of the themes incorporate elements that are familiar aspects of organizational behavior, such as task design (the theme we label “the work”) and social context (“embeddedness”). Even in these cases, however, our interviews surfaced novel ways of thinking about them as basic elements of goal pursuit. The remaining themes also raise issues that have not been explored in relation to goal pursuit. For example, goal-setting research can more fully consider how metaphors and analogies (“allegory”) influence goal pursuit, how self-identity (“self”) is implicated in self-regulation and goal striving at work (Lord et al., 2010), and how persistence results from perceptions of a goal’s uniqueness or the special opportunities and responsibilities it presents (“singularity”). Although the domain of long-term goal pursuit is relatively unexplored, and our themes bring perspectives that are novel in goal-setting research, they do have roots in motivation theory more generally. The constructs emerging from our study represent most of the categories used by Mitchell and Daniels (2003) in their comprehensive review of the motivation literature. The constructs found here populate the two broadest categories in the Mitchell and Daniels (2003) model: factors internal versus external to the individual. Internal factors in their review, all of which were found in our data, include expectancies, efficacy, goals, and online behaviors including self-regulation; external factors include task design, rewards and reinforcements, and social variables. The point here is that although our interviews revealed a variety of constructs that can supplement goal-setting theory, most are at least partially or indirectly validated in the broader literature on work motivation. Given the inductive flavor of the study reported here, the initial task for research going forward is to provide a more rigorous validation of the eight motivational themes. With the use of a structured instrument developed for this purpose and experience sampling, a representative sample of working individuals pursuing long-term goals could be assessed to see if all eight content themes recur widely and to identify those demographic or contextual factors that drive or constrain particular themes. Also important to explore is how the validated themes are influenced by ubiquitous situational factors such as job pressures and competing short-term goals that distract people from their long-term goals, undermining their ability to maintain long-term goal pursuit (Mischel & Ebbesen, 1970). Hazard/survival models could be useful in examining when and why people persist and drop out of their long-term goal pursuits (Lord et al., 2010; Singer & Willett, 2003).

Proximal experiences and distal possibilities Recognizing a priori that goals can be proximal or distal (Kanfer & Ackerman, 2000) and that longer term goal striving is aided by the pursuit of proximal goals (Locke & Latham, 1990), we expected and found evidence that truly long-term goal-pursuit is motivated by a blend of present-focused and anticipatory cognitive activities. Research has shown that immediate outcomes are more motivating than distal goals (Karniol & Ross, 2005). However, as we noted earlier, existing research has not considered ambitious long-term goals that are all that long-term; accordingly, our findings are especially informative regarding psychological factors contributing to the persistent pursuit of truly distal and perhaps visionary goals. We propose in the model that long-term persistence reflects interest in the task and other gratifications deriving from proximal experiences, as well as the current psychological influence of future possibilities. With respect to the latter, possible futures and possible selves are important perceptions of distal possibilities experienced by effective long-term Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.



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goal strivers. These representations of future states of one’s self-identity and of the imagined effects of ultimate goal achievement constitute an extension of simple short-term work goals into a more expansive set of cognitive motivators of long-term goal pursuit. Consistent with the perspective that concepts of the self can guide self-regulation and professional adjustment and development (Ibarra, 1999; Lord et al., 2010; Markus & Wurf, 1987), our data suggest that possible selves are important to individuals pursuing very long-term goals. People expect and envision a variety of future scenarios including not only performance accomplishments and their impact on society and others but also images of themselves as they might or will look, feel, or behave (Markus & Nurius, 1986). Future research on this part of our model should begin with an empirical exploration of the linkages we propose between motivating themes and aggregate dimensions capturing distal possibilities and proximal experiences. Those linkages imply propositions that some themes primarily trigger motivation through distal possibilities, whereas others operate primarily through proximal experiences, whereas still others implicate both motivational avenues. As with the matter of construct validation mentioned earlier, the significant challenge is identifying an appropriate sampling frame that encompasses individuals engaged in truly long-term goal pursuit and that simultaneously is able to generate a sample of wide demographic and occupational diversity.

Self-regulation processes Our interviews revealed many examples of self-regulation as people pursue their long-term goals. First, considering goals and feedback as fundamental elements of self-regulation (Latham & Locke, 1991), the operation of goal portfolios (e.g., multiple short-term and long-term goals) and feedback portfolios (a variety of feedback types and sources of information) underscores the importance of considering more fully the multiple complex sources of motivation that can operate jointly and serve as targets of self-regulatory strategies. In complex environments such as the workplace, people typically cultivate multiple goals and receive (and can seek) feedback in various forms and from multiple sources. Whereas laboratory experiments, appropriately, typically manipulate one or two goals or feedback levels or types, theory and research (Austin & Vancouver, 1996) describe the existence of complex hierarchies composed of many goals of different types, all of which can generate feedback. Goal hierarchies provide a possible lens for studying the goal and feedback portfolios and self-regulation of working professionals up to the level of top executives (Bateman, O’Neill, & Kenworthy-U’Ren, 2002). Researchers can investigate goal hierarchy composition more explicitly in terms of shorter and longer term goals, their corresponding varieties of feedback, multi-faceted self-regulation strategies, and any or all of the content themes revealed in our analysis. This dual emphasis on more complex goal and feedback portfolios would be fruitful; but according to Sansone and colleagues (Sansone & Smith, 2001; Sansone & Thoman, 2005, 2006), self-regulation theories that focus on goals and feedback are too limited, obscuring other critical components of the process. To persist in long-term goal pursuit, a person needs not only goals but also intrinsic motivation deriving from positive experience during goal pursuit. Goals themselves are important, but so is the quality of the subjective experience while engaged in the task over time. Psychologists have recently called one of our aggregate themes, task interest, “the missing motivator in selfregulation” (Sansone & Thoman, 2005, p. 175). Self-regulation is particularly essential when one is working on a boring but important task that requires prolonged attention and effort (Sansone & Smith, 2001). The experience of interest can be a proximal motivator for persistence and subsequent engagement after interruptions, particularly over the long term (Harackiewicz, Barron, & Elliott, 1998). More broadly, we suggest that people can regulate all four aggregate dimensions and hence their intrinsic motivation as they pursue their goals. In the absence of short-term goal achievement and performance-contingent rewards, these psychological experiences during goal pursuit may be key to sustaining motivation over time. Ideally, task characteristics make the task intrinsically rewarding; short of this, or additionally, people can engage in selfregulatory activities that include seeking and experiencing task interest and short-term gratifications, and contemplating distal possibilities, at fluctuating but adequate levels over time. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


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A focus on these constructs as motivating factors for long-term persistence differs from traditional perspectives on intrinsic motivation in several ways. First, an important distinction between this perspective on intrinsic motivation and others is that it depends not on need satisfaction (e.g., Ryan & Deci, 2000) but on the actual, anticipated, or sought experience of task interest (Sansone & Smith, 2001) and the other themes. Second, motivated performance in long-term goal pursuit need not depend on a particular set of specific task characteristics (e.g., Hackman & Oldham, 1976). Third, extrinsic and intrinsic sources of motivation are not necessarily opposed or independent of one another (Sansone & Smith, 2001). The long-standing belief in the incompatibility of extrinsic and intrinsic sources of motivation (e.g., Deci, Koestner, & Ryan, 1999) is perhaps aided and abetted by the short-term nature of most research. But the nature of the activity of work within a job can vary over time. In the course of working, the substance and evaluation of the experience itself evolve. People can self-regulate as they engage in their work for both extrinsic and intrinsic reasons. Extrinsic and intrinsic sources of motivation may be positively interrelated over time, and it is important to attend to both kinds. Thus, persistent long-term goal pursuit by working adults is likely to require self-regulating a combination of extrinsic and intrinsic sources of motivation, in ways that supplement rather than combat one another. In a related vein concerning intrinsic motivation, the findings of this study inform the literature on meaningful work (e.g., Pratt & Ashforth, 2003; Wrzesniewski, 2003). People view or have orientations toward their work as a job, a career, or a calling (Wrzesniewski, McCauley, Rozin, & Schwartz, 1997). Our participants had strong relationships with their work and typically thought that the work had the potential to make the world a better place, indicating a calling orientation. Importantly, callings and meaningful work are not a function solely of passive response to work design and environmental characteristic, but can be created proactively by individuals via job crafting (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001). Pratt and Ashforth (2003) likewise consider meaningfulness to be subjective and not a fixed property of a job or organization and assume that individuals actively desire and seek meaningfulness. Just as individuals can create meaningful work, they can enhance the factors that inspire task interest, additional short-term gratifications, future possibilities, and hence long-term goal pursuit. Of course, as Bunderson and Thompson (2009) observe, calling can be a double-edged sword—not only ennobling but also constraining, requiring unbending duty and vigilance. We did not see evidence of this in our interviews, but the degree to which, and how, work as a calling intersects with long-term goal pursuit is a subject ripe for future empirical study. On the basis of their long-term pursuit of goals they may never achieve, study participants were living a work life of delayed gratification. But this turned out not to be the primary domain of the study because we (they) identified so many intermediary gratifications. Rather, our findings generally are consistent with a self-signaling model of selfregulation (Prelec & Bodner, 2003), which distinguishes two types of rewards: those that are (i) experienced directly from the consequences of choice and (ii) diagnostic, in which moral pleasure or pain is derived from learning something positive or negative about one’s own disposition or future prospects. Self-regulation, delayed gratification, and longterm goal pursuit may each be facilitated by strategies that focus on diagnostic rewards more than on just the tangible consequences of behavior. Perhaps, the same point can be made about feedback: our field typically (but not solely) considers feedback as performance-related, when it could perhaps more profitably be construed as any information that provides descriptive and evaluative information about oneself, the meaningfulness of the work, and the amount and nature of interest one can find in one’s work.

Limitations and implications This is a unique study, with strengths including its depth in an unexplored and unconventional domain (Bamberger & Pratt, 2010) and also limitations inherently associated with the interview methodology. Topics such as this are best studied via introspection (Locke & Latham, 2004), and we took precautions to attenuate possible bias in participants and researchers. We studied an appropriate and informative sample of exemplars but had no comparison samples. We had no independent measures of behavior (other than the fact that our participants had for years been pursuing long-term goals) or performance. Generalizability is limited, and the findings may not apply to other types of samples (including samples from other countries and cultures that have differing perspectives on time) pursuing Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.



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other types of goals. One particular demographic issue is the age skew of our sample—a median age of 50 years, suggesting that young professionals pursuing very long-term goals are undersampled. If one were to speculate, for instance, that age heightens patience and tenacity, then our findings may not account fully for self-regulation processes experienced differently by younger working adults.1 A major limitation of the study is that it did not explicitly investigate intertemporal choice, nor did we compare our data directly against data from short-term goal pursuits. Additional questions that require empirical answers include the following: How and at what points does short-term motivation turn into a more binding long-term commitment (Meyer, Becker, & Vandenberghe, 2004)? How can organizations create more supportive environments for long-term goal pursuit? Can the factors we found be made part of an organization’s culture? In what contexts is a longer time horizon “better” (or not)? How can people develop greater temporal depth (Bluedorn, 2002) and optimally manage the challenges of multiple goals (Mitchell, Harman, Lee, & Lee, 2008) including short-term and long-term goals? How can implementation intentions (strategies about when, where, and how goal pursuit strategies will be enacted; Gollwitzer, 1999), which are applied effectively to short-term goal accomplishment, be applied most effectively in long-term goal pursuit? Longitudinal studies are requisite; they can entail multiple interviews over time, multiple collections of questionnaire data, and the exploration of critical incidents possibly including verbal protocol analysis. Special attention can be given to lulls in perceived progress that are not relieved by the short-term gratifications revealed here. The role of learning presents another significant opportunity for future inquiry. On the basis of the frequency, variety, and compelling nature of the comments elicited in our interviews, it is clear that learning is an important form of perceived progress that enhances task interest and intrinsic motivation, perhaps most particularly when performance progress is limited. Thus, people’s learning and performance goal orientations may be of particular interest in this domain. For example, learning goal orientation is associated with the processing of negative feedback in ways that improve performance (VandeWalle, Ganesan, Challagalla, & Brown, 2000)—an important self-regulatory competency, particularly in long-term pursuits. Learning goal orientation also may generate greater variety in task behaviors, exposing a person to more sources of feedback, information, and task interest, whereas performance goal orientation may be more limiting and therefore require more concerted and different strategies of self-regulation. Identifying optimal combinations of learning and performance goal orientations is an area ripe for future research (Latham & Locke, 2007), and maximum effectiveness is likely to vary according to proximal versus distal goals and how they interact with task characteristics and self-regulatory processes. Individual differences may predict who maintains interest and persists over time, and how they do so, thereby implying differing management practices and self-regulatory strategies. Some of our interviewees commented that their kind of work is not for everybody, suggesting that it takes a particular kind of person to persist in pursuit of a goal that may never be reached. The “self” theme that emerged from our data points to the potential significance of disposition and identity as motivational touchstones. As examples, conscientiousness (Barrick & Mount, 1991; McCrae & Costa, 2008) and promotion focus (Higgins, 1997) probably enhance long-term goal striving, whereas openness to experience, neuroticism, and prevention focus may undermine it. One final implication concerns the many ways in which affective processes may be operating in long-term goal pursuit. Psychologists believe that cognition and affect interact to produce phenomenological experiences and behavioral responses including delaying gratification and persistence (Metcalfe & Mischel, 1999; Mischel, Ayduk, & Mendoze-Denton, 2003). Affective responses potentially underpin several concepts emerging from the data including the surprising or fun elements of work, the felt responsibility of a singular pursuit, the challenges posed by critics, and visceral connections with the past forged by metaphorical or analogical references to historical events. As Sitkin, See, Miller, Lawless, and Carton (2011, p. 549–550) argue in their work on stretch (seemingly impossible) goals, ambitious goals that direct energy “toward novel and unfamiliar 1

We thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this interesting possibility.



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opportunities” evoke from organization members reactions that are emotional in nature, providing “spark and collective initiative to explore and learn.” Furthermore, consistent with Bagozzi (2003), recent research confirms that anticipated affect—both positive affect generated by anticipated success and anticipated negative affect generated by failure—inspires greater persistence and performance (Greitemeyer, 2009). These anticipations and their effects, demonstrated in short-term experiments, are prime territory for future research in longer-term work environments. Beyond research implications, the findings of our study yield insights into the practice of management where long-term goal pursuit is important. Practical implications must be tempered by the need for future validating research but are straightforward based upon the factors identified here. Just as individuals can create and self-regulate task interest and the other constructs discussed earlier, managers can create contexts in which long-term pursuits are more (or less) likely to be supported and expressed. Managers who wish to focus their people and their motivation on long-term goals can take steps to identify, create, and make salient these factors and also to create work environments that interfere via short-term pressures only as necessary. Individuals desiring to achieve long-term goals can be proactive and behaviorally create or cognitively construe the allegories, markers of futurity, signs of progress and knowledge acquisition, indicators of self and singularity, work features, and embeddedness that inspire, support, and maintain long-term motivation. A person can generate these experiences from a variety of sources and mechanisms by applying self-regulatory strategies including self-monitoring of interest levels, engaging in self-talk about motivating themes in the work, changing activities, engaging with others in ways that re-generate motivation, anticipating positive affect from goal achievement or negative affect resulting from failure or withdrawal, and generally changing context, behavior, cognition, and affect in ways that enhance the salience of the interest-enhancing and other motivation factors identified here.

Conclusion Long-term goals arguably are at least as important as short-term goals in their ultimate consequences for individuals, organizations, and societies. The work reported here is perhaps the first attempt to study the psychology of long-term goal pursuit via working adults’ introspections. While providing evidence consistent with established theories and models of work motivation, our findings also present grounded evidence of the operation of particular and different constructs and processes, yielding the integrative model shown in Figure 2. The model is inductive and intended to suggest avenues for future research. Whereas the model’s domain is most evidently that of individual work motivation in pursuit of individual goals, it may have broader implications for other important team and organizational activities including strategy making and the pursuit of long-term strategic goals. March (1999, p. 73) described the evidence from organization studies as “overwhelming in substantiating a general organizational tendency to favor the present over the future.” Das (2004), speaking of strategic time horizons, noted the importance of being “mindful of the endemic conflict between short-term and long-term strategies and the trade-offs that are involved” (p. 72) and observed that “differences in future orientations between individual decision makers are neither recognized nor utilized to the organization’s advantage” (p. 62). Constructs and processes in the model could be studied not only among employees pursuing specific work goals but also among strategic decision makers and those who implement long-term strategies. Psychologists Johnson and Sherman (1990, p. 517), musing that the future “is open to possibilities because we are in the process of constructing it,” noted that “our only point of entry is now.” Now, we believe, is the time to expand our field’s search for theories and strategies that can help people and organizations pursue and achieve important long-term goals. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.



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Acknowledgements This research was supported in part by the Von Thelan fund at the McIntire School of Commerce. We thank Allen Bluedorn, Ingrid Fulmer, Tim Gardner, Terry Mitchell, and the reviewers for their very helpful comments on earlier versions.

Author biographies Thomas S. Bateman is a Bank of America professor, a management area coordinator, and a director of the leadership minor at the McIntire School of Commerce, University of Virginia. His current research centers around leadership, personal agency, proactive behavior, and personal goals. Bruce Barry is a Brownlee O. Currey Jr. professor of management and a professor of sociology at Vanderbilt University. His research on behavior at work, including ethics, conflict, power, negotiation, and justice, has appeared in numerous journals and volumes. He also writes about workplace rights and public policy issues at the intersection of business and society.

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