Understanding people’s tendency to imitate others’ actions is central to research on social interaction. Yet, an unresolved question is how imitative response tendencies become shaped by higher-level goals guiding observed and executed actions. We approached this question by investigating whether effects of congruency between observed and executed actions become modulated when both actions contribute to an overarching joint action goal. In three online experiments, participants selected one of two action targets that differed on a relative magnitude dimension in turns with a virtual partner. We manipulated imitative congruency between co-actors’ actions at the level of their individual goals (selecting the target with the higher/lower value) and on the level of their spatial response features (selecting the right/left target). The first two experiments revealed large performance costs when participants were explicitly instructed to adopt incongruent goals compared to their partner, which was further found to reverse imitative congruency effects related to spatial features of co-actors’ executed responses. Crucially, reframing the task by instructing participants to produce joint outcomes together with their partner did not influence the result pattern. The third experiment showed that others’ action goals have persistent effects on subsequent action performance even when they are not explicitly task-relevant and when congruency relations between one’s own and others’ action goals are cued in advance. Our results support goal-directed theories of imitation and show that contagious effects of others’ action goals persist in joint action contexts.