Building a Practically Useful Theory of

Goal Setting and Task Motivation:

A 35-Year Odyssey *

Edwin A. Locke
University of Maryland

&

Gary P. Latham
University of Toronto

Contact information:

Edwin A. Locke
30856 Agoura Rd., #B-2
Agoura Hills, CA 91301
818-706-9361
[email protected]

*This article was based in part on the first author's G. Stanley Hall lectures at the
annual meetings of the American Psychological Association in 1999 and the
Southeastern Psychological Association in 2000, on the second author's Presidential
address to the Canadian Psychological Association in 2001 and on his invited
address to the American Psychological Society in 2001.
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Building a Practically Useful Theory of Goal Setting and Task Motivation: A 35-
Year Odyssey

Abstract

This article summarizes 35 years of research on the effects of conscious performance

goals, in conjunction with self-efficacy, on the performance of tasks in work and

organizational settings. We discuss the core findings, the mechanisms by which goals

operate, moderators of goal effects, the relation of goals and affect, the role of goals as

mediators of personality, goal conflict, goals and risk, the relationship of conscious and

subconscious motivation, and the generality of goal setting theory. The importance of

conscious, goal-directed action in human life is stressed.

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In the 1950's and 1960's, the study of motivation in psychology was not quite

respectable. The field was dominated by behaviorists, and "motivation" was considered

by them to lie outside the person in the form of reinforcers and punishers. When internal

mechanisms were acknowledged, as in drive reduction theory, it was argued that they

were they were solely physiological.

McClelland, a non-behaviorist, argued the existence of internal motives, but these

were asserted to be subconscious (e.g., n Ach; McClelland, Atkinson, Clark, & Lowell,

1953) and hence measurable only by projective tests. There was agreement among the

behaviorists, drive-reductionists and advocates of subconscious motives that

introspection was not a valid method of understanding human motivation. This ruled out

the possibility of conscious regulation of action.

An exception to the anti-consciousness Zeitgeist was the work of T. A. Ryan.

Anticipating the cognitive revolution in psychology by a decade, Ryan (1970, p. 18),

argued that: "it seems a simple fact that human behavior is affected by conscious

purposes, plans, intentions, tasks and the like." For Ryan, these, which he called first-

level explanatory concepts, were the immediate motivational causes of most human

action.

Kurt Lewin and colleagues had studied conscious goals or levels of aspiration

(LA) years prior to Ryan’s work in a series of laboratory studies (Lewin, Dembo,

Festinger, & Sears, 1944), but LA was treated by them as a dependent rather than as an

independent variable. Mace (1935), a British investigator, perhaps less influenced by

American behaviorism, was the first to examine the effects of different types of goals on
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task performance. But his work was ignored except for a citation in Ryan and Smith's

(1954) classic text in industrial psychology.

Our work for the past 35 years has been based on Ryan's premise that conscious

goals affect action. As industrial-organizational psychologists, our primary interest was

explaining performance on organizational or work-related tasks. Thus we focused on the

relationship between conscious performance goals and level of performance rather than

on discrete intentions to take specific actions (e.g., apply to graduate school, buy coffee,

get an X-ray). The latter type of intentions have been studied extensively by social

psychologists such as Fishbein and Ajzen (1975).

Core Findings

The first issue we addressed was the relationship of goal difficulty level to

performance. Atkinson (1958), a student of McClelland, had shown that task difficulty

(probability of success) was related to performance in a curvilinear (inverse U) fashion,

with the highest effort level occurring when the task was moderately difficult, and the

lowest levels when the task was very easy or very hard. Atkinson did not measure

personal goals, and we were never able to replicate this effect with such goals. We found

that the highest or most difficult goals produced the highest levels of effort and

performance. Goal difficulty effect sizes (d) in meta-analyses range from.52 to .82

(Locke & Latham, 1990). Performance only levels off or decreases when the limits of

ability are reached, or when commitment to a highly difficult goal lapses (Erez & Zidon,

1984).

We also compared the effect of specific, difficult goals to a commonly used

instruction in work and organizational settings to "do your best." We found that specific,
 5

difficult goals consistently lead to higher performance than urging people to "do their

best". The effect sizes in meta analyses range from .42 to .80 (Locke & Latham, 1990).

In other words, when people are trying to do their best, they do not do so. Do-your-best

goals have no external referent, and thus are defined idiosyncratically. This allows for a

wide range of acceptable performance levels, which is not the case when a specific goal

level is specified.

Making the goal specific in itself does not necessarily lead to high performance,

because specific goals vary in difficulty. Goal specificity, however, does reduce variation

in performance, insofar as performance is fully controllable, by reducing the ambiguity

about what is to be attained (Locke, Chah, Harrison, & Lustgarten, 1989

Expectancy and Self-Efficacy

Goal setting theory appears to contradict Vroom’s (1964) valence-instrumentality-

expectancy (VIE) theory which states that the force to act is a multaplicative combination

of valence (anticipated satisfaction), instrumentality (the belief that performance will lead

to rewards) and expectancy (the belief that effort will lead to the performance needed to

get the rewards). Other factors being equal, expectancy should be linearly and positively

related to performance. However, since difficult goals are harder to attain than easy goals,

expectancy of goal success is negatively related to performance.

The apparent contradiction between the two theories is resolved by distinguishing

between expectancy within and between goal conditions (Locke, Motowidlo, & Bobko,

1986). With goal level held constant, which is implicitly assumed by VIE theory, higher

expectancies lead to higher performance. Across goal levels, lower expectancies,

associated with higher goal levels, are associated with higher performance.
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In social-cognitive theory (Bandura, 1986, 1997), the within-between problem is

eliminated altogether, because self-efficacy measures ask for efficacy ratings across the

whole range of possible performance outcomes rather than a single outcome (Locke et

al., 1986).

The concept of self-efficacy ties in with goal setting theory in various ways.

When goals are self-set, people with higher efficacy set higher goals than people with

lower efficacy. They also are more committed to assigned goals, use better task strategies

to attain goals, and respond more positively to negative feedback than people with low

efficacy (Seijts & Latham, in press). These issues are addressed further below.

Goal Mechanisms

Goals affect performance through four mechanisms. First, goals serve a directive

function; they direct attention and effort toward goal-relevant activities and away from

goal-irrelevant activities. This effect occurs both cognitively and behaviorally. For

example, Rothkopf & Billington (1979) found that students with specific learning goals

paid attention to and learned goal-relevant prose passages better than goal-irrelevant

passages. Locke & Bryan (1969) observed that people given feedback about multiple

aspects of their performance on an automobile-driving task improved their performance

on those dimensions for which they had goals, but not so for other dimensions.

Second, goals serve an energizing function. High goals lead to greater effort than

low goals. This is revealed using tasks which: (a) directly entail physical effort such as

the ergometer (Bandura & Cervone, 1983); (b) entail repeated performance of simple

cognitive tasks such as addition; (c) include measurements of subjective effort (Bryan &

Locke, 1967a); or (d) have physiological indicators of effort (Sales, 1970).

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Third, goals affect persistence. When participants are allowed to control the time

they spend on the task, harder goals lead to more prolongation of effort (LaPorte & Nath,

1976). It must be noted that there is often a trade-off between time and intensity of effort.

Faced with a difficult goal, it is possible to work faster and more intensely for a short

period, or more slowly and less intensely for a long period. Tight deadlines make for a

more rapid pace than loose deadlines (Bryan & Locke, 1967b; Latham & Locke, 1975).

Fourth, goals affect action indirectly by leading to the arousal, discovery and/or

use of task-relevant knowledge, including task strategies (Wood & Locke, 1990). It is a

virtual axiom that all action is the result of motivation and cognition, but they can interact

together in complex ways. Below is a summary of what has been found in goal setting

research (see Locke, 2000 for an integrative model):

 When confronted with task goals, people automatically use the knowledge and skills

they have acquired that are relevant to goal attainment. For example, if the goal

involves cutting logs, loggers use their knowledge of logging without the need for

conscious planning.

 If the path to the goal is not a matter of using automatized skills, people draw from a

repertoire of skills that they have utilized before in related contexts, and apply them

to the present situation. For example, Latham and Baldes (1975) found that logging

truck drivers who were assigned goals to increase the weight of their truck loads

made modifications to their trucks so that they could better estimate truck weight

before heading for the weighing station.

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 If the task for which there is a goal assigned is new to people, they will engage in

deliberate planning in order to discover strategies that will help them attain their goals

(Latham, Winters, & Locke, 1994; Smith, Locke, & Barry, 1990).

 People with high self-efficacy are more likely than those with low self-efficacy to

discover effective task strategies (Latham et al., 1994; Wood & Bandura, 1989).

There may be a time lag between assignment of the goal and the effects of the goal on

performance while people discover the strategies that will work (Smith et al., 1990).

 When people are confronted with a task that is new and complex, do-your best goals

sometimes lead to better strategies (Earley, Connolly, & Ekegren, 1989) than specific

hard goals because participants with the latter goals are so anxious to succeed that

they "scramble" to discover strategies in an unsystematic way and fail to learn what is

effective .The antidote is to set learning goals, e. g., "learn about how the task works

and try different strategies to see what happens." (Seijts & Latham, in press; Winters

& Latham, 1996).

 When people are trained in proper strategies, those given specific, hard goals are

more likely to use the trained strategies than those given other types of goals, thus

leading to better performance (Earley & Perry, 1987); however, if the strategy used

by the person is inappropriate, then hard goals lead to worse performance than easy

goals (Audia, Locke, & Smith, 2000; Earley & Perry, 1987).

Moderators

Goal commitment

The goal-performance relationship is strongest when people are committed to

their goals. The ultimate proof of commitment is action. Nevertheless, it is often useful
 9

to measure commitment before the fact (Seijts & Latham, 2000a). Commitment is most

important and relevant when goals are difficult (Klein, Wesson, Hollenbeck, & Alge,

1999), because hard goals may require high effort and are associated with lower chances

of success than easy goals (Erez & Zidon, 1984).

Two key factors facilitating goal commitment are the importance of the goal to

the individual and the person’s expectancy of reaching it.

Importance. There are many ways to convince people that goal attainment is

important (Locke & Latham, 1990). Making a public commitment to the goal enhances

commitment, presumably because it makes goal attainment a matter of integrity

(Hollenbeck, Williams, & Klein, 1989). In work settings, commitment can be enhanced

by the actions of leaders (e.g., communicating a compelling vision; using legitimate

power; offering rewards, supportiveness, etc.) In laboratory as well as field settings there

are "demand characteristics" due to the experimenter or supervisor having the legitimate

authority to assign goals.

An alternative to assigning goals is to allow subordinates to participate in setting

them. A series of studies by the second author and colleagues revealed that when goal

difficulty is held constant, there is no significant difference in performance between those

with participatively set versus assigned goals (e.g., Latham & Saari, 1979a, 1979b;

Latham & Marshall, 1982; Latham & Steele, 1983).

Erez and her colleagues (Erez, 1986; Erez, Earley, & Hulin, 1985; Erez & Kanfer,

1983), however, reached the opposite conclusion. They found that participative goals led

to higher performance than assigned goals. Working collaboratively, with Locke as the

agreed- upon mediator, Latham and Erez explored reasons for the discrepancy in their
 10

findings. They found that from a motivational perspective, an assigned goal is as

effective as one that is set participatively, providing that the logic or rationale for it is

given. But, if the goal is assigned tersely (e.g., “Do this ...” ) without explanation, it leads

to performance that is significantly lower than a participatively set goal (Latham, Erez, &

Locke, 1988). Overall, meta-analyses of participation effects (whether or not they

involved goals), eliminating studies that used percept-percept correlations between

perceived participation and perceived performance, yield an effect size of only .11

(Wagner & Gooding, 1987a, 1987b).

Subsequently, we found that participation studies had been focusing on the wrong

mechanism, namely motivation. Rather we observed that the primary benefit of

participation is cognitive in that it stimulates information exchange (Locke, Alavi, &

Wagner, 1997). For example, Latham, Winters, and Locke, (1994) found that with goal

difficulty level controlled, participation in goal setting had no beneficial effect. However,

participants who participated with others in formulating task strategies performed

significantly better, and had higher self-efficacy than those who did not participate in

formulating strategies.

Incentives are another means to enhance goal commitment. However, there are

important contingency factors here. One is the amount of the incentive. Second, goals

and incentive-type interact. When the goal is very difficult, paying people only if they

reach the goal (i.e., a task and bonus system) can hurt performance, because once the

participants see that they will not get the reward, their personal goal and self-efficacy

drop and consequently their performance. This drop does not occur if the goal is
 11

moderately difficult or if people are given a difficult goal but paid for performance rather

than goal success (Latham & Kinne, 1974; Lee, Locke, & Phan, 1997).

Expectancy. Self-efficacy enhances commitment. It is not the case, however, that

impossible-to-reach goals will lead to no commitment, because people may still value

partial goal attainment and the challenge of trying to attain the goal. Leaders can raise the

self-efficacy of their subordinates in several ways: (a) by insuring adequate training to

increase mastery that provides success experiences; (b) by role modeling or finding

models with whom the person can identify; and (c) through persuasive communication

that expresses confidence that the goal is indeed attainable (Bandura, 1997; White &

Locke, 2000). The latter may involve giving subordinates information about strategies

that will facilitate goal attainment. Transformational leaders raise subordinate efficacy

through inspiring messages to and cognitive stimulation of subordinates (Bass, 1985).

Feedback

For goals to be effective one needs summary feedback that reveals progress in

relation to one's goals. If the goal is to cut down 35 trees in an hour, there is no way to

tell if one is "on target" unless one has knowledge of how many trees have been cut

down. When people find they are below target, they normally increase their effort

(Matsui, Okada, & Inoshita, 1983) or try a new strategy. Summary feedback is a

moderator of goal effects in that the combination of goals plus feedback is more effective

than goals alone (Erez, 1977).

Task Complexity

A third moderator is task complexity. As task complexity increases, it usually

becomes increasingly difficult to use previously acquired skills and established routines
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during the early stage of learning, before relevant higher level skills have become

automatized. Goal effects on such tasks are dependent on the ability to discover suitable

task strategies. Since people vary greatly in their ability to do this, the effect size for goal

setting is smaller on complex than on simple tasks. Meta-analyses (Wood, Mento, &

Locke, 1987) reveal that the goal difficulty effect size (d) for the most complex tasks

is .48 vs. .67 for the least complex tasks. For specific difficult goals vs. a goal to do-your

best, the effect size is .41 for the most complex tasks vs. .77 for the least complex tasks.

Because there is more variation among people in the strategies employed on complex

tasks than on tasks that are easy, measures of task strategy often correlate more highly

with performance than do goals (Chesney & Locke, 1991). In addition, there are often

goal-strategy interactions, with goal effects being strongest when the best strategies are

used (Durham, Knight, & Locke, 1997).

On tasks that are complex, Kanfer and Ackerman (1989) found that focusing on a

specific, performance outcome goal interfered with focusing on the knowledge necessary

to perform the task. Winters and Latham (1996) showed that the fault was with the type

of goal that had been set; when a specific difficult learning (i.e., develop or discover n

strategies for mastering the task) rather than an outcome goal was set, consistent with

goal setting theory, high goals led to significantly higher performance than with a do their

best goal.

A contributing factor to task complexity is environmental uncertainty. The

information necessary for setting a goal at one point in time may be obsolete at a later

point due to changes in the environment. Thus, in a simulation of a stock market

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exchange, Earley, Connolly, and Ekregren (1989) found that urging people to do their

best led to higher performance than setting a specific outcome goal.

Latham and Seijts (1999) replicated these results using a simulated business game

involving monetary incentives. However, when proximal outcome goals were set in

addition to the distal outcome goal, self-efficacy as well as profits were significantly

higher than in the do-your-best condition, or the condition where only a distal outcome

goal had been set. In dynamic situations it is important to actively search for feedback

and react quickly to it in order to attain the goal (Frese & Zapf, 1994). As Dorner (1991)

noted, performance errors on a dynamic task are often due to deficient decomposition of

a distal goal into proximal goals. Proximal goals can increase what Frese and Zapf

(1994) called error management. Feedback regarding errors can yield information for

people as to whether their picture of reality is aligned with what is required to attain the

goal.

Goals and Affect

Goals are at the same time an object or outcome to aim for and a standard for judging

satisfaction. To say that one is trying to attain a goal of X means that one will not be

satisfied unless one attains X. Thus goals serve as the inflection point or reference

standard for satisfaction vs. dissatisfaction (Mento, Locke & Klein, 1992.) For any given

trial, exceeding the goal provides increasing satisfaction as the positive discrepancy

grows, and increasing dissatisfaction as the negative discrepancy grows. Across trials, the

more goal successes one has, the higher one's total satisfaction.
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There is a paradox here: how can people who produce the most, those with

difficult goals, be the least satisfied? The answer is found in the question. The reason that

people with hard goals produce more is that they are not satisfied with less. For them, the

bar for satisfaction is set at a high level. This is precisely what drives them to do more

than those with easy goals.

It does not follow from this that everyone is motivated to set low goals so as to

maximize satisfaction. There are many psychological and practical benefits associated

with setting and attaining high goals. Undergraduate business students (Mento et al.,

1992), reported four types of benefits associated with a GPA of A vs. B vs. C. These

benefits included: 1. Pride in performance; 2. academic outcomes such as getting into

graduate school or receiving a scholarship; 3. future job benefits such as a good offer and

a high starting salary; and 4. life benefits such as career success. Interestingly, pride in

performance was the highest of the four. At the same time, expected satisfaction with

performance showed the opposite pattern. The highest degree of anticipated satisfaction

was for students with a goal of C, and the lowest was for students with a goal of A. The

relationships (from Mento, et al., 1992) are shown in Figure 1.

In short, people who attain more do so by making themselves harder to satisfy.

This is what ambition is all about.

Goals and Self-Efficacy as Mediators

Locke (1991) proposed the concept of "the motivation hub," a hub being where

the action is. The motivation hub consists of two variables: goals (including commitment)

and self-efficacy. These variables are often the most immediate, conscious, motivational
 15

determinants of action. (This model ignores but does not deny actions based on emotion

or on subconscious motives).

It follows then that goals and self-efficacy should mediate the effects of more

remote determinants (what T. A. Ryan, 1970, called second level causes) of action (see

Locke, 2001, for a summary of relevant studies). With regard to assigned goals, the hub

concept predicts that their effects are mediated by the personal or self-set goals that

people choose in response to the assignment as well as by their self-efficacy. The

relationships between assigned goal difficulty, self-set goal difficulty, self-efficacy and

performance are shown in Figure 2. Observe that the assigning of a challenging goal

alone raises self-efficacy, because it is an implicit expression of confidence by the leader

that the goal is attainable. When goals are not assigned, the correlation between self-set

goals and self-efficacy is even higher.

The mediating effect of self-set goals and self-efficacy on monetary incentive effects

was noted earlier (Lee et al., 1997). However, all incentive studies do not show such a

mediating effect. Wood, Atkins, and Bright (1999) found that incentive effects were

mediated by instrumentality beliefs rather than by goals and efficacy.

As noted earlier, there is an interaction (moderator) effect between goals and summary

feedback so that when people pursue goals, feedback is necessary for the goals to

influence performance. However, summary feedback itself is mediated (Locke & Bryan,

1968). Bandura and Cervone (1986) found that both goals and self-efficacy mediated

feedback effects. Self-efficacy is especially critical when negative summary feedback is

given, because the level of self-efficacy following such feedback determines whether

subsequent goals are raised or lowered.

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As shown earlier, the benefits of PDM are primarily cognitive rather than

motivational. However, Latham and Yukl (1976) and Latham, Mitchell, and Dossett,

1978) found that employees who were allowed to participate in setting goals set higher

goals and had higher performance than those who were assigned goals. Kirkpatrick and

Locke (1996) found that goals and self-efficacy mediated the effect of visionary

leadership on subordinate performance.

The most theoretically interesting mediation effects are arguably in the realm of

personality. Psychologists have long been challenged by the problem of the general vs.

the specific. Personality traits are general, and only predict action in specific situations to

a limited degree, usually around .20; however, all action is task and situationally specific.

If traits refer not just to regularities of behavior, but to some underlying motive or value

syndrome, then the question becomes: How do people "apply" traits to situations? One

possibility is that their traits affect the specific goals as well as the self-efficacy that

people develop in specific situations, and that these hub variables partially or fully

mediate the trait effects. Several studies support this hypothesis (Locke, 2001). For

example, Barrick, Mount, and Strauss (1993) found that the effects of the trait,

conscientiousness, on sales performance were partially mediated by goals and goal

commitment. VandeWalle, Cron, and Slocum (in press) found that goals and self-efficacy

mediated the effect of Goal Orientation on student performance.

Goal Conflict

Goal conflict undermines performance through motivating incompatible action

tendencies (Locke et al., 1994). In organizational settings, the organization’s goal and the

goal of the individual manager sometimes conflict. Working to attain the organization’s
 17

goals can be detrimental to the monetary bonus of a manager, because managers are often

rewarded more for the performance of the people they lead than for the performance of

the overall organization.

Seijts and Latham (2000b) found that when specific, difficult goals of the person

are aligned with the group’s goal of maximizing performance, the group’s performance is

enhanced. Without such alignment, personal goals can have a detrimental effect on a

group’s performance. Group [I am not inventing this term; it has been used; I just

object to using a political concept in psychology] efficacy correlated positively and

significantly with the group’s performance, supporting Bandura’s (1997) assertion that

the concept of self-efficacy can be extended to groups. In organizational settings, people

may not commit to a specific, difficult group goal if they do not believe that others will

commit to doing so also.

Goals and Risk

Knight, Durham & Locke (2001) studied the effect of goals on risk-taking.

Prospect theory (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979) emphasizes reference points, as does goal

theory, but it does not incorporate the concept of aspiration level. Knight et al. found that

difficult performance goals increased the riskiness of the strategies participants chose to

use in a computer game.

Goals and Subconscious Motivation

Because we had studied conscious goals, and McClelland had asserted that

achievement motivation was subconscious, McClelland collaborated with the first author

to see if there was a relationship between these two concepts. The results, involving

entrepreneurs in the printing business, showed that nAch, measured by the TAT, had no
 18

concurrent or longitudinal relationship with to firm performance and no relationship to

entrepreneur-set goals. But, goal effects were highly significant in both cases (Tracy,

Locke & Renard, 1999).

Howard and Bray (1988) collected TAT data in a 25-year study of AT&T

managers. Based on McClelland, they constructed a leader motive pattern score from the

TAT that combined nPower, power inhibition, and nAffiliation (weighted negatively).

This measure was a significant predictor of a person’s number of promotions among non-

technical managers only over the 25-year period. However, manager ambition was the

best motivational predictor of number of promotions. Howard noted (personal

communication) that the core item in the ambition factor was a single interview question:

"how many levels up do you want to go?" This was the managers' conscious goal for

number of promotions.

. Howard also had some yet unscored TAT protocols that were added

subsequently to the data set. She also made some scoring adjustment after consulting with

McClelland about recent refinements in the procedure for calculating leader motive

pattern. In the re-analysis, the leader motive pattern was not significantly related to

progress. In contrast, the one item interview question about promotion goal was a strong

predictor of progress for both technical and non-technical managers over the same 25-

year period. There was no relation between leader motive pattern and goals.

Two tentative conclusions may be drawn from these results. First, Ryan’s first-level

explanation of motivation, namely conscious goal setting, is more reliably and directly

tied to action than are second level explanations (e.g., motives) even over long periods of
 19

time. Second, the conscious and subconscious aspects of achievement motivation are

unrelated.

Practice

The basic research reviewed in this paper has had significant effects on practice.

This is because goal setting is a straightforward technique for increasing employee

productivity (Locke & Latham, 1984). Productivity is a key variable that affects the

standard of living in a country, that is, national wealth.

Selection

Latham, Saari, Pursell and Campion (1980) developed the situational interview

(SI) to assess an applicant’s intentions or goals. In brief, applicants are presented

situations, based on a job analysis. Each question contains a dilemma. The applicants

are asked to explain what they would plan to do when confronted by these situations.

Meta-analyses have shown that the SI has high criterion related validity (e.g., Huffcutt &

Arthur, 1994, Latham & Sue-Chan, 1999). McDaniel, Whetzel, Schmidt and Maurer

(1994) concluded that the mean criterion-related validity of the SI is higher than that of

all other selection interviews.

Performance appraisal

As noted earlier, engineers and scientists who set goals for their scores on a

behavioral index of performance that was to be used to appraise them (Gary: correct?)

had higher subsequent performance than those who were urged to do their best (Latham,

Mitchell, & Dossett, 1978). Moreover, the performance of those who were urged to do

their best was not significantly different from that of engineers/scientists in a control
 20

group. This null result was found despite the fact that the people in the do best condition

received praise, public recognition, or a monetary bonus.

Self Regulation

Job attendance is a prerequisite of job performance. Consequently, Frayne and

Latham (1987) adapted F. Kanfer’s (1970, 1996) methodology for the development of a

training program to teach state government unionized employees ways to overcome

obstacles they perceived to coming to work. Specifically, the training program taught

those employees to set specific high goals for attendance, monitor ways in which this

environment facilitated or hindered attainment of their goal, and to identify rewards for

making goal progress, as well as punishments for failing to make progress toward goal

attainment.

This training in self-management not only enabled these employees to cope

effectively with personal and social obstacles to their job attendance, but consistent with

social cognitive theory (Bandura, 1986, 1997), it increased their self efficacy because

they could exercise influence over their behavior. Increases in self-efficacy correlated

significantly with increases in job attendance. Moreover, the job attendance of the people

who were taught these self management skills was significantly higher than that of the

control group three months after the training had taken place.

In a follow-up study, Latham and Frayne (1989) found that the increase in self-

efficacy and the increase in job attendance were maintained over a 9-month period. Then

the control group was provided the same training in self-regulation skills as the original

experimental group Three months later the job attendance and self-efficacy regarding job

attendance increased to the same level as that of the original experimental group.
 21

Using Meichenbaum’s (1971, 1977) methodology, Millman and Latham (2001)

evaluated the effect of training in functional self talk on the goal commitment of

displaced managers to become re-employed. Managers who received seven 2-hour

training sessions increased their self-efficacy so that they could overcome perceived

obstacles to their performing well in finding and securing a job. Within 9 months they

were employed in jobs that paid + $10,000 of their original job. Only one person in the

comparison group was re-employed.

Similarly, Brown and Latham (2000) studied the teamplaying behavior of MBA

students in their respective study groups. Those students who set a specific goal

regarding their evaluation by peers, and received training in functional self-talk had

higher self-efficacy and higher teamplaying skills than those in the control group.

Mental practice is symbolic guided rehearsal of a task in the absence of any

physical involvement (Richardson, 1967). Using this methodology, mental practice

where goal setting was either implicit or explicit, was investigated by Morin and Latham

(2000) as a transfer of training intervention regarding the communication skills of

supervisors with the union. Six months later, self-efficacy was significantly higher for

the supervisors who had received training in mental practice and goal setting than those

in the control group. Self-efficacy correlated significantly with goal commitment and

communication skills on the job.

Finally goal setting research had led to the development of the concept of the high

performance cycle (HPC; Locke & Latham, 1990; Latham, Locke, & Fassina, in press).

The HPC explains how high goals lead to high performance which in turn lead to

rewards, satisfaction, and organizational commitment. This cycle explains the lack of a
 22

direct connection between job satisfaction and subsequent productivity, an issue that has

long puzzled psychologists. The HPC shows that high satisfaction is the result, not the

cause, of high performance when rewards are commensurate with performance. The

subsequent effect of satisfaction on action is therefore indirect rather than direct. Job

satisfaction leads to performance only if it fosters organizational commitment, only if this

commitment is to specific, challenging goals, and only if the moderator variables

discussed in this paper are taken into account.

Conclusion

Goal setting theory was developed inductively over four decades. It is based on

hundreds of empirical studies. Ryan's advice to focus on the immediate causes of human

action has proven to be sound. Goal setting effects are very reliable; failures to replicate

are usually due to errors such as: not matching the goal to the performance measure, not

providing feedback, not getting goal commitment, not measuring the person’s personal

(self-set) goals, lack of task knowledge, setting an outcome goal when a learning goal

was required, or failure to include a sufficient range of goal difficulty levels (Locke &

Latham, 1990).

A key issue involved in theory building is that of generalization. With respect to

goal setting theory, specific difficult goals have been shown to increase performance on

over 100 different tasks, involving more than 40,000 participants in at least eight

countries working in laboratory, simulations, and field settings. The dependent variables

have included: quantity, quality, time spent, and job behavior criterion measures. The

time spans have ranged from one minute to 25 years. The effects are not only applicable

to the individual, they are applicable to groups [O'Leary-Kelly, Martocchio, & Frick,
 23

1994], organizational units [Rogers & Hunter, 1991)], and the entire organization [Baum,

Locke, & Smith, 2001]. The effects occur regardless of whether the goal is assigned,

participative or self-set. The effects have been found using experimental, quasi-

experimental, and correlational designs.

Furthermore, goal theory has been integrated with other theories of work

motivation (Locke, 1997), including Bandura’s (1986, 1997) social cognitive theory.

Goal setting has been applied to non-work domains such as sports and health

management (Gauggel, 1999). It can be applied to any self-directed activity.[do not

understand your comment; this does not repeat prev. par.]

Goal setting theory is based on the premise that the essence of life is purposeful,

goal-directed action. This can be validated by anyone with a few minutes of

introspection. We are therefore in strong disagreement with neo-behaviorists and neo-

Freudians who argue that human action is governed primarily, if not exclusively, by the

environment and/or by subconscious or unconscious mental processes.

Bargh and Chartrand (1999, p. 462), for example, claim that, "most of a person's

everyday life is determined not by their [sic] conscious intentions and deliberate choices

but by mental process that are put into place by features of the environment and that

operate outside of conscious awareness and guidance." These authors do not deny the

existence of consciously purposeful action, but they argue that it is relatively

unimportant. Even more radical are Wegner and Wheatley (1999, p. 480), who, as

materialists, argued that thought is an epiphenomenon and that free will is an illusion.

They claimed that, all behavior can be ascribed to mechanisms that transcend human

agency.
 24

We acknowledge that people posses subconscious minds--a storehouse of all their

knowledge, beliefs and values--and that the subconscious operates automatically, as in

the case of appraisals that lead to emotions. We agree that people sometimes can be

affected in their reactions in ways that they do not realize, especially if they are poor at

introspection. But it does not follow from this that people are essentially automatons. The

fundamental issue is: who or what is ultimately in charge of the subconscious? For

example, did the authors of the above two articles deliberately choose to do their

experiments and write the articles, or did they sit back and let the subconscious do all the

work, totally unaware of what was going on?

Two basic points need to be made here. First, it must be noted that psychological

determinism--the theory that all human actions, beliefs and choices are caused by factors

outside their control--is untenable. Many writers (e.g., Bandura, 1997; Binswanger, 1991;

Locke, 1966) have pointed out the insuperable contradiction of determinism (and

epiphenomenalism). If people were just robots, then all claims of knowledge of anything,

including determinism, are meaningless. All the determinist can say is: "I was

conditioned to emit the following word sounds" (and he could not even know that, viz., "I

was conditioned to say that I am conditioned," etc.). Conceptual knowledge pre-supposes

the ability to look at the evidence and to integrate it by purposely using certain methods

(e.g., logic) in order to arrive at the truth (Peikoff, 1991).

Second, free will, far from being an illusion, is an axiom. By this we mean that it is

self-evidently true and that it forms the base of all further conceptual knowledge. The

fundamental choice, which can be validated by introspection, is the choice to think or not

to think (Binswanger, 1991; Peikoff, 1991)--to raise one's mind to the level of conceptual
 25

understanding and integration or to let it drift passively at the level of sense perception,

which is given automatically. This choice gives people the power to be the prime movers

of their own lives (within the limits of what the environment allows).

If people have free will, it means that they can choose to be mentally passive, to drift

through life (so long as thinking people are backing them up) by letting the subconscious,

especially emotions, take charge. But such passivity is not built into human nature.

People also have the power to actively control their lives through purposeful thought

(Bandura, 1997); this includes the power to program and re-program their subconscious,

to choose their own goals, to pull out from the subconscious what is relevant to their

purpose and to ignore what is not, and to guide their actions based on what they want to

accomplish. The work of Howard reported above shows that a single, conscious goal can

guide action across a 25-year time span. As the first author noted some years ago (Locke

1995, p. 265), "Isn't it time we took consciousness seriously?"

 26

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