Stretch goals have enduring appeal, but are the right organisations using them?

BACKGROUND

The healthcare industry faces significant challenges and opportunities that demand lofty aspirations and novel approaches. Pursuing seemingly impossible goals, popularly known as 'stretch goals', can be a way to instigate dramatic change and innovation, but such extreme goals also come with substantial risks. After briefly reporting the results of a national survey we conducted to provide examples of how stretch goals are used in healthcare, we review and translate prior research on the effects of stretch goals on organisations and their members.

FINDINGS

The survey results indicate that stretch goals are used regularly in healthcare and a wide range of other industries. Roughly half of respondents indicated that their current employer had used a stretch goal in the past 12 months. Healthcare stretch goals were focused on reductions in errors, wait times, and no-show rates, and increases in workload, patient satisfaction, clinical research participation, and vaccination uptake. Our review of prior research suggests that stretch goals can instigate both positive and negative psychological, emotional, and behavioural reactions. Although existing scholarly evidence suggests that stretch goals will have problematic effects on learning and performance for the majority of organisations that use them, stretch goals actually can have beneficial effects under some specific circumstances that we outline.

CONCLUSION

Stretch goals are risky yet regularly used in healthcare and many other industries. They can be valuable, but only when an organisation has both strong recent performance and available slack resources to devote to goal pursuit. Under other conditions, stretch goals tend to be demotivating and destructive. We explain the paradoxical nature of stretch goals, whereby the organisations least likely to benefit from them are most likely to adopt them, and offer guidance on how healthcare leaders can tailor their goal setting practices to conditions most likely to lead to successful outcomes.

Speaking truth to power: The academic as jester stimulating management learning

The jester embodies an ancient social institution, which serves a paradoxical purpose: to mitigate the excesses of power, while serving and supporting the ruler through a license to jest. The metaphor of the jester, used constructively, offers a unique window on the contradictions of organizational studies and their paradoxical role in relation to corporate practices. We explore how jesting may inform academic work through using humour and laughter to deconstruct organizational taboos and convey truth to power. We suggest that academic jesting constitute a wise and undervalued way in which management learning can occur.

Using Stretch Goals for Idea Generation Among Employees: One Size Does Not Fit All!

This study explores heterogeneity in the efficacy of stretch goals for engaging employees in innovation, as stretch goals may both boost norm-breaking creativity and hamper fruitful ideation by overwhelming employees. Through a multilevel perspective, we demonstrate that stretch goals motivate more capable employees (successful, experienced, senior) to submit useful innovative ideas by combining the motivation of stretch goals with these employees' ability to discern fruitful from futile ideas. Other employees, meanwhile, may “spin their wheels” and submit lower-quality ideas based on their inability to apply useful knowledge. Empirically, we leverage idea generation data from a Fortune 500 firm. We contribute to stretch goals research by demonstrating both the intended and the unintended consequences that shape employee behavior and to the innovation literature by articulating when stretch goals can and cannot motivate valuable innovation from employees.

Effect of stretch goals on work–family conflict

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to examine the destructive effects of stretch goals on employees’ work–family conflict (WFC). Drawing on the conservation of resources (COR) theory, this study examines the mediating role of resource scarcity. By integrating the paradox theory with the COR theory, this study explores the moderating role of employees’ paradox mind-set.

Design/methodology/approach

Two-wave data were collected from a sample of MBA students in Northwestern China (N = 294). PROCESS was used to assess a moderated mediation model.

Findings

This study found a positive relationship between stretch goals and WFC, and resource scarcity mediated this relationship. For employees with a high paradox mind-set, the relationship between resource scarcity and WFC was weak; and the indirect effect of stretch goals on WFC via resource scarcity was weak.

Practical implications

Organizations should provide enough resources to employees when using stretch goals. Human resource managers could recruit candidates with high paradox mind-set and foster employees’ paradox mind-set through training.

Originality/value

This study makes contributions to the literature on stretch goals by examining the negative spillover effect of stretch goals on the family domain and exploring the mediating mechanism. This study also extends the paradox theory by using it at micro level to address questions on WFC.

DECONSTRUCTING LAWSON AND SAMSON’S CONCEPT OF INNOVATION CAPABILITY: A CRITICAL ASSESSMENT AND A REFINEMENT

For almost 20 years, research on firm level innovation have relied upon [Lawson and Samson (2001). Developing innovation capability in organisations: A dynamic capabilities approach. International Journal of Innovation Management, 5(3), 377–400] concept of innovation capability (IC). Of note, these authors stated that this concept needs to be ‘refined, validated and tested using other research methods’ [Lawson and Samson (2001). Developing innovation capability in organisations: A dynamic capabilities approach. International Journal of Innovation Management, 5(3), 377–400], p. 396. To date, empirical studies heeding this call have been challenging to find. By researchers relying on this untested concept, they risk not attaining comprehensive insights into the firm level mechanisms underpinning the transformation idea and knowledge into innovations. This paper proposes a rethinking of the IC concept. The analysis is based on survey data of 69 firms involved in the Australian maritime industry using exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The results suggest that the IC concept might be refined from seven dimensions, initially conceptualised, to three dimensions. The three dimensions are renamed as institutionalising innovation, implementing innovation and stimulating innovation.