Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation: A 35-year odyssey.

“…expected to be achieved at some specified time in the future, and that for which all effort and essential resources are therefore committed to accomplish (Lee et al. 1989; Stretcher et al. 1995; Locke and Latham 2002; Locke and Latham 2006; Fitsimmons 2008; Day and Tosey 2011; Nanji et al. 2013).”

“The theory of Locke & Latham [89] was used in four articles (7%) to underpin the importance of specificity and difficulty of goals [14, 29, 37, 52].”

“In the organizational literature, goal setting theory (Locke & Latham, 2002, 2013) further posits that goal difficulty is a key factor in determining performance, such that people put in more effort and perform better when they pursue difficult yet attainable goals.”

“…& Latham, 1978; Shane, Locke, & Collins, 2003; Anderson, Dekker, & Sedatole, 2010).2 The theory states that wage irrelevant goals are an important determinant of employees’ motivation to work and hence affect their productivity (see Locke (1996) and Locke and Latham (2002) for a literature review).”

“Although the advantages of autonomous motivation in mobilizing and allocating goal-related resources have been well documented (Sheldon, 2008), goal pursuit is rarely without its challenges.”

“These students seem to have established the more specific achievement goals that typically leading to better performance than vague or general goals, such as try to “do your best” (Locke and Latham, 2002).”

“More than five hundred field and laboratory studies support these core findings (Locke and Latham, 2002).”

“…effort to goal-related activities, 2) energize the individual both mentally and physically (e.g. higher goals create more effort than lower goals), 3) prolong the effort to reach a goal, and 4) arouse, lead to discovery of, or retrieve task-relevant knowledge and strategies (Locke & Latham, 2002).”

“Setting clear objectives has been identified as an important work motivator in goal-setting theory (Locke & Latham, 2002), which addresses the question of what specific ways of instruction work best for individual performance.”

“Goal-setting is an instrumental skill for achieving objectives and motivating behavior toward a performance standard (Locke & Latham, 2002).”

“Goals have been shown to be most effective when they 253 are important to the individual, when the individual can see their progress, and when they receive 254 positive feedback about progress toward their goal (39) .”

“Goal theorists claim this positive relation between academic aspirations and academic success is linked to the behaviors in which students engage when they have strong aspirations (Ames, 1992; Berndt & Miller, 1990; Elliot & Harackiewicz, 1996; Locke & Latham, 2002; McGregor & Elliot, 2002).”

“Locke’s Goal Setting Theory Even though Locke and Latham (2002) do not specifically mention hope in their review of the 35 years of goal-setting research, it can be inferred that hope plays a role in the goal setting process.”

“After people successfully attain an intrinsically motivated goal, they are likely to become more ambitious by aiming even higher in the next round of goal pursuit (Locke and Latham 2002).”

“Moreover, consciously setting a specific challenging goal has been shown to lead to significant increases in job performance (Latham & Locke, 2007; Locke & Latham, 2002).”

“There is abundant empirical evidence that such characteristics affect the adaptiveness of goals (e.g., Freund, 2006a; Freund & Ebner, 2005; Little, 1989; Locke & Latham, 2002; Riediger & Freund, 2004; Wiese & Freund, 2005).”

“…measurability, and time-defined schedules), however, have been highlighted as important for goal accomplishment in popular-press books (Burka & Yuen, 1983; Ferrari, 2010; Grant Halvorson, 2010; Pychyl, 2013) and in long-held theoretical accounts of goal setting (Locke & Latham, 2002, 2006).”

“…of what the organization should achieve in the future can be an important driver of employee action and performance (Latham and Yukl, 1975; Locke and Latham, 2002) and motivation (Wright, 2007); second, transformational leaders share their vision with the employees and establish a clear…”

“Empirical research has further supported the role of setting one’s own goals to promote higher task performance (Locke and Latham 1990, 2002).”

“Although Locke and Latham (1990) find that multiple goals were more effective, their findings were mostly based on the comparison between multiple goals and no goals because multiple goals were more specific.”

“…commitment to bringing them about’ (Bandura, 2001, p. 6) • Intentions imply a commitment to the attainment of goals through the development of plans (Locke & Latham, 2002) Capabilities An agent’s power or ability to do something • An individual’s objectively measured capability to produce a…”

“…effect of losing in a competition on performance in a subsequent competition is stronger 6 A large psychological literature on goal setting finds that when there is no financial incentive for reaching a goal, more challenging goals make people strive harder (see Locke and Latham 2002, for a survey).”

“In academic research, curiosity is a distinct construct, though closely related to reinforcement schedules [16, 62], as well as goal-setting theories of motivation [32], which have been studied in several social computing [3, 17, 63] contexts.”

“Under goal setting theory, goals are a strong predictor of planned behavior (Locke & Latham, 2002).”

“The purpose of the activity-based leagues was to maintain strong competition among similarly active participants and minimize discouragement.(21) The competition-based leagues were grounded in the cognitive evaluation theory, which states that intrinsic motivation is based on an individual’s need for competence, achie…”

“Locke and Latham’s (2002, 2013; Latham & Locke, 2007) goal-setting theory states that feedback moderates the likelihood of goal attainment because the feedback informs an individual whether a different strategy is needed or more effort is required. The feedforward process leads to the setting of a high performance goa…”

“In the postmotivational phase, a global goal intention is converted into a set of specific intentions: action plans with relevant strategies that will enable them to attain this goal (62).”

“Locke and Latham (2002) found, however, that the extent to which goals affect”

“Just as individual goals can promote task strategies that optimize individual performance (Locke & Latham, 2002), clearly specified grouplevel goals set the standards of the effectiveness of the team and facilitate the development of cooperative strategies and transactive memory (Gully,…”

“Additionally, in an effort to boosting students’ self-efficacy, educators should encourage them to set successful goals and showing them how to work toward their achievement (Locke and Latham 2002).”

“…target-oriented tasks at the expense of those irrelevant to targets; regulates employee effort through target-level difficulty; and affects persistence (e.g., working faster versus longer) depending on whether the targets are coupled to a time limit (Latham and Locke 1991; Locke and Latham 2002).”

“The most reported BCT was the Goal-Setting Theory (GST) [67], used in 4 of the systems.”

“Learning Goal Orientation Goal-setting theory (Locke and Latham 1990, 2002) has underlined the importance of specific, difficult, but achievable goals for performance enhancement.”

“Moreover, achieving selfcongruent goals is more satisfying than achieving extrinsically motivated goals (Judge et al., 2005; Locke & Latham, 2002).”

“According to goal-setting theory, more specific goals lead to higher performance (Bandura 1989; Lee et al. 1989; Locke and Latham 2002).”

“Goal-setting [49] and self-monitoring [50] were considered due to their suitability for mobile technology [51] and alignment with user feedback.”

“Clear organizational goals help define and shape employee attitudes and behaviors (Bandura, 1997; Bandura & Locke, 2003; Locke & Latham, 2002; Rainey, 1989).”

“A goal is de fi ned as what an individual is trying to accomplish – it is the aim or object of an action (Locke et al., 1981), such as to attain a speci fi c standard of pro fi ciency on a task (Locke & Latham, 2002).”

“Grand goals work best when translated into context (Locke & Latham, 2002; Sachs, 2005).”

“…potential mediators of the Pygmalion effect in organizations: leader–member exchange (LMX) relationship (Graen & Uhl-Bien, 1995), goal setting (Locke & Latham, 1990, 2002), providing learning opportunities (Blumberg & Pringle, 1982; Peters & O’Connor, 1980), and providing feedback (Ilgen,…”

“In this case, both creative and non-creative solutions exist and the explicit instruction to be creative may serve as goal-setting to direct one’s attention to goal-relevant (i.e., be creative) activities (Locke & Latham, 2002).”

“The “Goals” section of the app was the only feature conceptualized a-priori, with the aim of providing a theory-driven module (33) for improving selfmanagement motivation and confidence in young people with asthma.”

“Given these pervasive models, it seems natural to conclude that consciously controlled goal pursuit is delegated to the rulebased system, and hence this form of goal pursuit is viewed as productive, deliberative, and flexible, and as involving intention and conscious monitoring (e.g., Locke & Latham, 2002 ).”

“Individuals high in self-efficacy are more likely to set themselves challenging goals (Locke & Latham, 2002), continue striving towards these goals despite setbacks (Bandura, 1997), and have increased belief in their levels of goal attainment (Kane, Marks, Zaccaro, & Blair, 1996).”

“The power of clear goals for performance lies in the way that “goals combine cognitive and motivational elements” (Lindenberg & Foss, 2011, p. 504) to endow them with an Ingrams 227 “energizing function” (Locke & Latham, 2002, p. 706).”

“Early behavioral feedback combined with goal setting (Latham & Locke, 2007; Locke & Latham, 2002) or self-goal setting (Elliot & Fryer, 2008; Zimmerman, 1990) has been proved to be a dropout mitigation strategy by promoting motivation, self-efficacy, and self-regulation (Jivet et al., 2020).”

“The existing evidence base originates primarily from investigations into enhancing performance on tasks in the workplace, and the finding that specific, challenging goals can improve immediate performance (Locke & Latham, 2002).”

“In organisational psychological research, studies have shown that people with high levels of self-efficacy set higher goals (Locke & Latham, 2002 ) and display greater task persistence than those with low self-efficacy (Bandura & Cervone, 1986 ).”

“Some of the most prominent process theories are, for instance, goal-setting theory (Locke and Latham 2002), social-cognition theory (Bandura 1977), or expectancy theory (Vroom 1964).”

“Employee participation is also emphasized by goal-setting theory in that the sense of ownership created through this process helps to build employee acceptance and commitment to goals (Locke & Latham, 2002).”

“Repetition in the early stages is best facilitated where the individual is intrinsically motivated (that is, pursues behaviour for its personal value, rather than to satisfy external demands) [39,40], where target behaviours are manageable and realistic [41], and where people actively monitor their progress [37].”

“According to goal-setting theory (Locke and Latham, 2002), goals enhance performance by directing attention to goal-relevant cognitions and behaviors, increase motivation and persistence, and stimulate the regulation of task-related strategies (Wood and Locke, 1990).”

“Incorporating behavior change theory, such as self-efficacy theory [22] and goal-setting theory [43] , researchers have attempted to tackle a paradox of compliance; users fail to persist with given health-promoting behaviors because goals are too easy or too dif-ficult.”

“…(e.g., Bandura, 1997; Rutter, 1987), that self-efficacy influences the difficulty of goals that individuals set for themselves (e.g., Bandura, 2009; Locke & Latham, 2002), and that the goal levels individuals set for themselves are positively associated with performance (e.g., Morisano et al.,…”

“In line with the goal setting theory (Locke & Latham, 2002), failing to align individual or group goals with those of the organization can have detrimental effects on the overall performance.”