A Comprehensive Model of Goal Dynamics in Organizations: Setting, Evaluation and Revision1,2

Goal setting plays a central role in most simulation models of individual or social behavior. In the simplest case, there is a constant goal and the modeling effort focuses on the difficulties involved in reaching that given goal. In more realistic situations, the goal itself is variable: it can erode as a result of various phenomena such as deeply rooted traditions or frustration due to persistent failure, it can evolve further as a result of confidence caused by consistent success, or it can be consciously evaluated and adjusted periodically as a result of some formal process. In any case, 'goal dynamics ' constitutes a fundamental sub-problem in most situations dealing with dynamics of individual or social behavior. As such, there has been considerable research effort on how to model the dynamics of goal formation in system dynamics models. With respect to the three types of goal dynamics mentioned above, in the literature there exist some model structures that capture certain limited and linear 'goal erosion ' dynamics. We extend the existing models to obtain a most general theory of goal formation dynamics, by including performance improvement capacity constraints, short term and long term time pressures in reaching the set goal and more realistic, richer mechanisms of goal erosion. We show that the syste