On Commitment
"Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes; but no plans." - Peter F. Drucker
Commitment leads to greater Consistency (On Consistency).
I'm not sure if the reverse is true (yet) -- that Consistency can lead to Commitment, although I have a feeling that it does.
But certainly, without commitment to something -- a goal, a principle, a relationship -- one can't be consistent.
In fact, consistency could very well be the canary for one's level of commitment.
Example: I want to be committed to writing regularly, every day, because I want to improve my writing and impact something useful to my daughters.
That commitment means next to nothing if I didn't show any consistency.
What, then, does it take to be committed?
"Committere" (14th century) mean "to entrust."
Perhaps that is where you can begin to cultivate commitment: to identify what you have been entrusted with.
"Commit your way to the Lord; trust in him, and he will act." - Psalm 37:5
A committed relationship is one where both parties are entrusting themselves to another.
How, then, does this translate to a commitment towards goals?
It seems having such a commitment improves performance:
"The results of a meta-analysis of 83 studies revealed a significant, positive correlation between goal commitment and performance (p = .23; Wofford, Goodwin, & Premack, 1992). This correlation is even higher when the goal is difficult (Klein, Wesson, Hollenbeck, & Alge, 1999). In a study by Hollenbeck, Williams, and Klein (1989), goal commitment moderated the goal difficulty-performance relationship such that there was a significant, positive relationship only when commitment was high" (Locke & Latham, 2002, p. 707).
Reference: Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (2002). Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation: A 35-year odyssey. American Psychologist, 57(9), 705-717. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.57.9.705
If this is so, then it makes little sense to have a goal without commitment. A goal without commitment is wishful thinking.
So the time to formulate commitments are at goal-setting.
Is the framing, "I am being entrusted to do a certain set of things"?
This can be used to positive effect by having public declaration of your goals:
"As predicted, participants worked harder (i.e., longer) on a collective task to the extent that they had been told that the group was more dependent on their individual efforts; on average, participants plugged away 33% longer in the high-dependence condition (M = 10.40 min) than in the low-dependence condition (M = 7.83 min), F(1, 171) = 9.38, p < .005" (Kerr & Kaufman-Gilliland, 1994, p. 526).
Commitment to goals and tasks are stronger when you're entrusted by others, probably others you care about, to complete them.
In an organization, my experience is that people commit to tasks out of social dependency, but not always for good reasons. Sometimes people operate from a lizard brain (I will be punished if I don't); some from an "entrusted" position (those people depend upon me so I need to deliver).
I remember working with someone at my previous company who could not meet a deadline. She missed everything.
And that I think is largely because she didn't care about the impact on other people. The sociopathy which is increasing, some of it due to society, some of it due to the leadership at these companies, is detrimental.
Commitment can be an individual virtue; and in the end, personal responsibility has a role.
But so does one's mind set:
"In one study, we taught a growth mindset to a group of adolescents who had been labeled as having learning difficulties. They had been stuck in a fixed mindset, believing that their abilities were carved in stone. As a result, they had become discouraged and uninterested in school. After learning a growth mindset, they showed a remarkable turnaround, developing a new commitment to learning and a willingness to put effort into their schoolwork.
Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. Random House.
But one's commitment is bolstered by a positive sense of "trust" held.
This will relate to the power of community On Community.
tldr;
Commitment -> Consistency
Social Trust -> Commitment
Commitment -> Higher Performance