Explaining performance variability: Contributions of goal setting, task characteristics, and evaluative contexts

263 undergraduates participated in a factorial design consisting of 4 goal conditions (no goal, do your best, easy goal, and difficult goal) × 3 evaluative contexts (control, peer evaluation, and compliance) × 2 task characteristics (low and high variety) × 2 (order of task presentation); all Ss worked on 2 tasks (manual and cognitive). Univariate MANOVAs revealed that performance on the cognitive task was significantly affected by type of goal, task variety, and evaluative context. Performance on the manual task was affected by task variety and evaluative context but not by type of goal. For both tasks, satisfaction was adversely affected by the presence of goals but was unaffected by evaluative contexts. For the cognitive task only, satisfaction was significantly higher in the low-variety condition. (19 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).