Abstract:
This study aimed to investigate the impact of production goals on employee performance in the mining industry in Zimbabwe. Despite implementing goal setting strategies to enhance employee performance, the management at Trojan Nickel Mine (TNM), Freda Rebecca Gold Mine (FRGM) and Shamva Mining Company to a lesser extent involve employees in the goal setting process, causing a discrepancy between theory and practice. Furthermore, goals set by a group of TNM senior managers are not aligning with the goals of the organization as a whole, leading to potential conflicts between individual employee goals and the employing organization. This results in a distinction between formal goals (officially stated goals) and informal goals (actual goals pursued), which may be inferred from decisions made and actions taken within the organization. The research objectives sought to explore the relationship between team goal setting, goal clarity, participative goal setting, and goal timeframe and employee task proficiency in the mining industry. The study employed a sample size of 200 respondents, who participated in data collection through structured questionnaires. Both stratified and simple random methods were used to select the sample. The data collected was analysed using descriptive statistics and inferential analysis. The study results revealed that there is a significant positive relationship between team goal setting and employee task proficiency in the mining industry. The statistical analysis shows a t-statistic of 7.943 (p>.001) indicating that the relationship between these two variables is strong and statistically significant. The research results indicate that there is a significant positive relationship between goal clarity and employee task proficiency in the mining industry. The statistical analysis showed a t-statistic of 8.486 and a p-value of .004, indicating that the effect of goal clarity on task
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proficiency is statistically significant. The results of the statistical analysis revealed a statistically significant positive relationship between goal setting (p= .010) and employee task proficiency. The results showed that there is a positive relationship between goal timeframe increases and task proficiency, indicating that as goal timeframe increases, task proficiency is estimated to increase as well. However, the statistical analysis revealed that the relationship is not statistically significant (p=0.071>0.05).Thestudy recommended that mining companies in Zimbabwe should implement team-oriented goal setting practices that actively involve employees in the goal formulation process and managers in the mining sector in Zimbabwe should provide teams with autonomy to determine the strategies and action plans for achieving the set goals.
