Edwin Locke

Edwin A. Locke is an American psychologist and a pioneer of goal-setting theory who is a retired Dean's Professor of Motivation and Leadership at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, College Park, also affiliated with its Department of Psychology. Through decades of research with Gary Latham he established that specific, well-defined goals produce better performance than vague or easy targets and that performance rises with goal difficulty up to the limit of a person's ability, work the Association for Psychological Science has called the most published body of organizational psychology research in the field's history.