Goal-Setting Theory: What Locke and Latham's Research Found

Most goal advice is folk wisdom: aim high, write it down, stay positive. Goal-setting theory is different. It was built from decades of experiments, led largely by two industrial-organizational psychologists, Edwin Locke and Gary Latham, who summarized the work in a 2002 American Psychologist article subtitled "A 35-Year Odyssey."

Their research focused mainly on work tasks, not New Year's resolutions. But Locke and Latham noted that goal setting had also been applied in nonwork areas such as sports, and wrote that it is "applicable to any self-regulated activity." That includes your personal goals for time, money, health habits and learning.

Here is what the theory actually says, what makes goals work better, and the side effects later researchers warned about.

The core finding: specific, hard goals beat "do your best"

Locke and Latham found a positive, linear relationship between goal difficulty and performance: the most difficult goals produced the highest levels of effort and performance. Performance leveled off or dropped only when people reached the limits of their ability, or when their commitment to a very hard goal lapsed.

They also compared specific, difficult goals with the familiar instruction to "do your best." Specific, difficult goals consistently led to higher performance. Their summary is blunt: "when people are asked to do their best, they do not do so." A do-your-best goal has no external reference point, so almost any result can feel acceptable.

Specificity on its own isn't the magic ingredient. A goal can be specific and easy. What specificity does is remove ambiguity about what you are trying to reach. The performance boost comes from goals that are both specific and challenging.

For example, imagine two people who want to save money. One resolves to "be better with money." The other decides to move a fixed amount from each paycheck into savings for the next six months. Only the second person can tell, on any given day, whether she is on track.

Why goals work: four mechanisms

Locke and Latham described four ways goals affect what people do:

1. Direction. Goals point attention and effort toward goal-relevant activities and away from irrelevant ones.
2. Energy. High goals lead to greater effort than low goals.
3. Persistence. When people control how long they work, hard goals prolong effort. Tight deadlines also led to a faster pace than loose ones, in the lab and in the field.
4. Strategy. Goals prompt people to use the knowledge they already have, borrow skills from related situations, or, on a task that is new to them, plan deliberately to find a strategy that works.

A useful habit is to ask each of these questions about a goal you are setting: Where will this direct my attention? Is it hard enough to call for real effort? Is there a deadline? Do I already know how to do this, or do I need to work out a method first?

What makes goals work better

The research identified moderators, conditions that strengthen or weaken the effect of a goal.

Commitment. The link between goals and performance is strongest when people are committed, and commitment matters most when goals are difficult. Locke and Latham named two broad drivers: how important reaching the goal is to the person, and self-efficacy, the person's belief that they can reach it. Making a public commitment also strengthened commitment in the studies they reviewed.

Feedback. People need summary feedback that shows progress in relation to the goal. As the authors put it, if the goal is to cut down 30 trees in a day, people can't tell if they are on target "unless they know how many trees have been cut." Goals combined with feedback were more effective than goals alone. A 2016 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin by Harkin, Webb, Sheeran and colleagues, covering 138 experimental studies, found that interventions that increased progress monitoring promoted goal attainment, with larger effects when progress was physically recorded or reported to others.

Task complexity. In the meta-analyses Locke and Latham cited, goal effects were smaller on the most complex tasks than on simple ones, because success depends on finding the right strategy, not just on effort. For new, complicated skills, a different kind of goal can work better; see our guide Learning Goals vs. Performance Goals: When to Use Each.

The satisfaction paradox

Goals also set the bar for how satisfied you feel. Locke and Latham pointed out a paradox: people with hard goals tend to accomplish more but feel less satisfied with any given result. "People with high goals produce more because they are dissatisfied with less."

This is worth knowing in advance. If you set a stretch goal and feel unsatisfied with good progress, that feeling is built into the design, not proof that you are failing. Plan to notice and record progress along the way rather than judging everything by the final number.

The side effects: when goals go wild

In a 2009 Harvard Business School working paper titled "Goals Gone Wild," Lisa Ordóñez, Maurice Schweitzer, Adam Galinsky and Max Bazerman argued that the benefits of goal setting had been overstated and its harms largely ignored. They listed side effects including a narrow focus that neglects non-goal areas, a rise in unethical behavior, distorted risk-taking, and reduced intrinsic motivation. They also noted that most goal research had been done in simple, well-specified tasks.

One example they described is goals acting as ceilings. In a study of New York City cab drivers, many drivers set daily earnings goals. On rainy days they made money faster, hit their goal sooner and went home, at exactly the time when demand was highest.

Personal goals can go wild in similar ways. For example, imagine a reading goal that quietly pushes you toward shorter books you care less about, or a weekly word-count target that rewards padding over good writing. Locke and Latham themselves flagged goal conflict, which undermines performance when two goals pull you toward incompatible actions.

Putting the research to work

• Make the goal specific and genuinely challenging, but within reach of your current ability.
• Write down why it matters to you and what gives you reason to think you can do it. Those are the two drivers of commitment.
• Decide what you will measure, when you will check it, and where you will record it.
• If the goal involves a skill you don't have yet, consider a learning goal first.
• Ask what the goal leaves out. Name one thing you will protect while you chase it.
• Check your goals against each other for conflicts before you commit to all of them.

Key takeaways

• In Locke and Latham's research, specific, difficult goals led to higher performance than vague "do your best" goals.
• Goals work by directing attention, raising effort, extending persistence and prompting strategy.
• Commitment, regular feedback and task complexity change how well a goal works.
• Hard goals can lower satisfaction with good results, so track progress, not just the finish line.
• Goals have side effects, including narrow focus and goals acting as ceilings; check what yours leaves out.

Sources

• Edwin A. Locke and Gary P. Latham, Building a Practically Useful Theory of Goal Setting and Task Motivation: A 35-Year Odyssey, American Psychologist (September 2002)
• Lisa D. Ordóñez, Maurice E. Schweitzer, Adam D. Galinsky and Max H. Bazerman, Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Over-Prescribing Goal Setting, Harvard Business School Working Paper 09-083 (2009)
• Harkin, Webb, Chang, Prestwich, Conner, Kellar, Benn and Sheeran, Does Monitoring Goal Progress Promote Goal Attainment? A Meta-Analysis of the Experimental Evidence, Psychological Bulletin (2016), PubMed record