Edwin Locke

Who they are

Locke is an industrial and organisational psychologist, long associated with the University of Maryland. He proposed goal-setting theory in a 1968 paper on task motivation and incentives, and the theory grew out of that paper through studies in laboratories and workplaces.

His long collaboration with Gary Latham produced the 1990 book-length review of the theory and the 2002 retrospective in American Psychologist. In both, the work is presented as a theory built from accumulated experiments and field studies, tested on a very large number of participants by the time of the 1990 review.

Locke is not an author of The 4 Disciplines of Execution. He appears in the Why We Project because the research he and Latham reported overlaps with part of that framework, and the article What are the 4 Disciplines of Execution? cites the 2002 review for that overlap.

Key papers

Locke, E. A. (1968). Toward a theory of task motivation and incentives. The founding paper of goal-setting theory.

Locke, E. A., and Latham, G. P. (1990). The book-length review of the theory.

Locke, E. A., and 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. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.57.9.705.

Key ideas

The central proposal is that specific, difficult goals lead to higher performance than an instruction to do your best. The reason offered is that an instruction to do your best has no external reference point, so people define it for themselves and a wide range of performance passes as acceptable. See Goal Setting Theory.

The 2002 review names four mechanisms. Goals direct attention, raise effort, extend persistence and prompt the discovery of task strategies.

It also sets conditions. Goals combined with feedback performed better than goals alone. Commitment matters most for hard goals and can be strengthened by making a goal public. Task complexity reduces the effect, since success on a complex task depends on finding a strategy. Ability limits how far performance can rise with difficulty. Participation in setting a goal added little.

These conditions are the reason the theory connects to research on Progress Monitoring and to management frameworks such as the Wildly Important Goal, which borrows the idea of a specific, demanding target.

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