Mounting information processing demands in contemporary organizations spotlight the need to better understand how to maintain and improve performance without increasing cognitive load. Research in organizational behavior suggests that primed goals provide performance benefits similar to assigned goals but with little cost to attention. Yet, some research in social psychology suggests that any form of goal use, including primed goals, usurps attention. To reconcile these viewpoints, we examined the relationships among assigned and primed goals, performance, and demands on attention (measured as cognitive load) in three experiments. Experiment 1 (n = 233) showed that when a primed goal is aligned with an assigned goal, performance improved without increasing cognitive load. In contrast, Experiment 2 (n = 515) demonstrated that when a primed goal is misaligned with an assigned goal, performance worsened and cognitive load increased. Study 3, a quasi-field experiment with 315 working professionals, added internal and external validities to the prior experiments. We also examined task novelty and complexity as boundary conditions. For novel tasks (Experiments 1 and 2), when perceptions of task complexity increased, the positive effect of an aligned primed goal diminished. However, for a well-practiced task (Experiment 3), increased task complexity did not diminish the positive effect of aligned goals.

中文翻译：

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通过关注任务绩效的认知负荷来提高人类在工作中的可持续性


现代组织中不断增长的信息处理需求凸显了更好地了解如何在不增加认知负荷的情况下保持和提高绩效的需求。对组织行为学的研究表明，启动目标提供类似于指定目标的绩效优势，但关注成本很小。然而，社会心理学的一些研究表明，任何形式的目标使用，包括启动的目标，都会侵占注意力。为了调和这些观点，我们在三个实验中检查了分配和启动的目标、绩效和对注意力的需求（以认知负荷衡量）之间的关系。实验 1 （n = 233） 表明，当启动的目标与分配的目标保持一致时，表现会得到改善，而不会增加认知负荷。相比之下，实验 2 （n = 515） 表明，当启动的目标与分配的目标不一致时，表现会恶化，认知负荷会增加。研究 3 是一项由 315 名在职专业人员进行的准现场实验，为之前的实验增加了内部和外部有效性。我们还研究了作为边界条件的任务新颖性和复杂性。对于新任务（实验 1 和 2），当对任务复杂性的感知增加时，对齐的启动目标的积极影响会减弱。然而，对于一个练习良好的任务（实验 3），任务复杂性的增加并没有减少对齐目标的积极影响。