Goals, when accepted, lead to higher performance levels. Then the employee will work more and meeting the difficult goal. Managers should strive to reinforce progress toward the goal, maintenance of performance at or above the goal, and achieving levels of performance above the goal . Reinforcement theory is a behaviorist application that is based on the idea that people are not driven by motivation or other internal events, but by their environment. The reinforcers, or positive consequences, for a behavior, are what make it more likely to happen again.
Reinforcers work best when they are immediate, sincere, and specific to an activity.
Managers wanting to apply reinforcement theory to the workplace can do so through organizational behavior modification, a successful and scientific approach to changing behavior based on the research of B.F. Skinner. The importance of reinforcement can also be seen in the performance-reward linkage segment of expectancy theory, discussed below. The theory predicts that the probability of an individual to act a particular manner will increase when an employee associates it strongly with a given, attractive outcome. Motivation, then, is a function of attractiveness, expectancy, and instrumentality. Both expectancy and reinforcement theory hold that a reward, or outcome, must be meaningful to the individual, and must be seen as highly likely to result from a given behavior to be effective.