There is overwhelming evidence in the behavioral sciences that consciously set goals can
increase an employee’s performance. Thus HR professionals have had little, if any reason to
become interested in subconscious processes. In the past decade, however, laboratory experiments
by social psychologists have shown that
goals can be primed. That is, behavior is affected by
goals that people are unaware of. Because a conscious goal consumes cognitive resources, this
finding has implications for employee efficiency in the workplace. The present paper describes
the results of priming a performance goal in two organizational settings. Call center employees
who were primed through a photograph of a woman winning a race raised significantly more
money from donors than those who were randomly assigned to a control group. A meta-analysis
of three field experiments revealed an average d-statistic of .56 (p < .05).