Gary Latham

Who they are

Latham is an organisational psychologist, long associated with the University of Toronto. He and Edwin Locke worked together on goal-setting theory for more than thirty years, producing a 1990 book-length review and the 2002 retrospective in American Psychologist.

Goal-setting theory was tested in workplaces as well as laboratories, and the 2002 review draws on both. It is regarded as one of the better-supported theories in organisational psychology, with conditions attached to its main finding.

Latham is not an author of The 4 Disciplines of Execution. He appears in the Why We Project because the research he and Locke 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., and Latham, G. P. (1990). The book-length review of goal-setting 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 2002 review summarises a finding with conditions. Specific, difficult goals generally produced higher performance than an instruction to do your best, through four routes: attention, effort, persistence and strategy. See Goal Setting Theory.

The conditions the review states are feedback on progress, commitment to the goal, ability, and task complexity. Goals combined with feedback performed better than goals alone, and the effect was smaller on complex tasks where the difficulty lies in finding a strategy.

The feedback condition links the theory to research on Progress Monitoring. The idea of a specific, demanding target appears in management frameworks such as the Wildly Important Goal discipline in The 4 Disciplines of Execution.

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