ON THE MEANING AND MEASUREMENT OF GOAL COMMITMENT

Recent research by Tubbs and Dahl (1991) and Tubbs (1993) has proposed that discrepancy measures of goal commitment are superior to self-rep ort measures. We explore the theoretical, practical, and empirical pro blems with discrepancy measures of goal commitment. We reanalyzed some of the relationship discussed by these authors using their data and d emonstrate that the failure to control for ability leads to incorrect conclusions regarding the relative usefulness of discrepancy versus se lf-report measures. In addition, we conducted a separate study to furt her compare the usefulness of these different measures. Finally, we di scuss the meaning of goal commitment and the role of goals in the moti vational process.