New Developments in Goal Setting and Task Performance

The book is an edited scholarly reference that consolidates and updates the goal-setting research program associated with Locke and Latham. Its central contribution is not a single new thesis but a comprehensive stocktaking: it reviews mediators such as self-efficacy and commitment, moderators such as task complexity and feedback, applications to groups and organizations, and boundary conditions where goal setting can produce unintended effects. By assembling chapters from multiple researchers, it functions as a state-of-the-field volume rather than a monograph advancing one argument. It also engages critiques directly, which distinguishes it from introductory treatments. Readers should approach it as a literature review and extension of the 1990 Locke–Latham monograph.

The volume reaffirms the central empirical generalization that specific, difficult goals lead to higher task performance than vague or easy goals, provided people are committed, receive feedback, and possess adequate ability and situational support. It also reaffirms the mediating role of self-efficacy and the importance of task strategies for complex work. These claims are treated as well-supported across decades of research, and chapters extend them to group and organizational levels. At the same time, the book is careful to note moderators — task complexity can weaken the direct goal-performance link — which makes the theory more conditional than popular summaries suggest. The reaffirmation is therefore nuanced rather than dogmatic.

The book engages directly with the well-known critique, associated with scholars such as Maurice Schweitzer, Lisa Ordóñez, and Bambi Douma, that narrow, quantifiable goals can motivate cheating, risk-taking, and neglect of unmeasured aspects of performance. Rather than dismissing this, chapters examine conditions under which goal setting produces such side effects, including goals that are too specific, too difficult, or tied to incentives without safeguards. The volume treats these as boundary conditions that refine the theory rather than refute it. This engagement is one of the book's strengths as a scholarly reference: it shows the research program responding to its critics and incorporating their concerns into a more conditional account.

It revises and extends the earlier monograph, which laid out the theory and its evidence base. The 1990 book established the core propositions and reviewed the then-available research; this edited volume updates that picture with subsequent findings, addresses new domains such as group goals and cross-cultural applications, and responds to critiques that emerged after the original publication. The relationship is therefore one of revision within a continuing research program. Readers new to goal-setting theory may find the earlier monograph more systematic, while specialists will use this volume for current evidence and debates. The editors position the newer work as reflecting developments rather than replacing the foundational statement.

Task complexity is a significant moderator because difficult goals help most when the task is well understood and the person knows what to do. On complex, novel tasks, a difficult goal can impair performance if people lack the strategies to pursue it, because they may focus on the outcome rather than learning the task. The volume discusses how self-efficacy, strategy development, and feedback interact with complexity, and it recommends practices such as assigning learning goals for unfamiliar tasks. This nuance is important because popular applications of goal setting often ignore task complexity and overgeneralize the 'specific and difficult' prescription. The book's treatment makes the theory more useful for real work design.