Conscious and nonconscious goal pursuit in multidimensional tasks

Abstract

Multidimensional tasks are often characterized by goal conflict as individuals struggle to simultaneously balance and monitor multiple performance goals. Motivated by the recent psychology research on conscious and nonconscious goal pursuit, we hypothesize that conveying the importance of one performance goal consciously while priming the other performance goal nonconsciously will help individuals more effectively pursue multiple performance goals simultaneously and ultimately improve overall task performance. We conduct a laboratory experiment, using a real-effort multidimensional task, to test our hypotheses and find evidence to confirm our predictions. Our research contributes to the scant accounting research on nonconscious processes. It also provides a novel solution to the goal conflict problem in a multidimensional task setting.