Improving Human Sustainability at Work by Focusing on Cognitive Load of Task Performance

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.