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Goal setting: a possible theoretical framework for examining
the effect of priming goals on organizational behavior
Gary P Latham
Goals can be set consciously or they can be primed. Both goal
setting theory [3,4] and the automaticity model [7] provide
frameworks for doing one versus the other. The present paper
describes both field and laboratory experiments that primed
goals to pursue organizationally relevant tasks. The results
suggest the benefit of testing the automaticity model within the
framework of goal setting theory.
Address
Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, Canada
Corresponding author: Latham, Gary P (latham@rotman.utoronto.ca)
Current Opinion in Psychology 2016, 12:85–88
This review comes from a themed issue on Social priming
Edited by Fritz Strack and Norbert Schwarz
For a complete overview see the Issue and the Editorial
Available online 18th July 2016
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2016.07.005
2352-250X/# 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Among the primary concerns of organizational psycholo-
gists is increasing the job performance of an organization’s
employees in fair, ethical ways. With regard to employee
motivation, the theory that is considered to be the most
valid and practical [1,2] for doing so is the framework
developed by Locke and Latham [3,4], for consciously
setting goals.
A limitation of this theory, acknowledged by Locke and
Latham [5], is that it does not take into account subcon-
scious processes. This is a limitation because the subcon-
scious is a vast storehouse of information. Moreover,
cognitive resources are limited [6]. Consciously set goals
use more cognitive resources than goals that are primed in
the subconscious. Thus the automaticity model [7] is
important to organizational psychology because it pro-
vides an efficient way to improve task/job performance,
namely to prime goals. In addition, the model is important
to goal setting theory because it fills the void regarding
subconscious goals.
A limitation of the automaticity model is that it lacks a
theoretical basis for its assertions [8]. In this article, both
goal setting theory and the automaticity model are de-
scribed. The remainder of this article focuses on why goal
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setting theory may provide a framework for examining
the effect of priming goals on organizational behavior.
Goal Setting Theory (GST)
GST states that a specific, challenging goal leads to higher
performance than a specific easy goal, a vague goal such as
the exhortation to do your best, or setting no goal at all.
The theory specifies four moderators of this causal rela-
tionship: ability, commitment, feedback, and situational
resources to attain the goal. Four mediators explain the
goal–performance relationship: choice, effort, persis-
tence, and strategy. Whereas the first three are predomi-
nantly motivational in nature, the fourth, strategy, is
cognitive. The causal relationships, moderators, and med-
iators were developed inductively from approximately
400 studies [3]. At the present time there are well over
1000 [9].
GST distinguishes between a performance goal where
the focus is on a desired outcome (e.g., a golf score of 80)
and a learning goal where the focus is on discovering or
developing a strategy, process or procedure for increasing
performance (discover 5 specific ways to improve your
putting). Performance is a function of motivation and
ability [10]. If the person already has the requisite knowl-
edge and skill, a performance goal should be set. If the
person is lacking in ability, a learning goal should be set
[11,12].
The Automaticity Model (AM)
An emerging research stream in organizational psycholo-
gy is based on [Bargh’s (1994)] Automaticity Model (AM),
which states that a prime is an external cue in the
environment that activates a mental representation stored
in memory. This in turn automatically leads to goal
pursuit in the absence of conscious deliberation or aware-
ness if the mental representation is motivationally rele-
vant to, or valued by, the individual. As noted earlier,
integrating the AM with GST removes the criticism that
the latter ignores the subconscious. Note that consistent
with the AM, ‘motivational relevance’ and ‘valued’ are
also emphasized explicitly by GST [13] which states
that a consciously set goal must be important to the
individual in order for there to be goal commitment.
The model further states that the pursuit of goals that are
primed as well as those that are consciously set follow the
same processing stages, predict the same phenomena, and
produce the same outcomes. As is the case with GST, the
AM also emphasizes the importance of another moderator.
Current Opinion in Psychology 2016, 12:85–88
86 Social priming
The situation must facilitate rather than inhibit goal pur-
suit/attainment.
The AM has been tested largely by social psychologists.
The lack of a theory of the prime-goal performance
relationship and the inability of some cognitive psychol-
ogists (e.g., [14,15,16]) to replicate the original findings
of priming researchers (e.g., [17]) has led to what is
currently called a ‘replicability crisis’ [18]. Factors con-
tributing to this crisis may reflect experimenter bias,
demand effects, participant awareness, or that the effect
of a prime is so fragile that it lasts only seconds/minutes
and hence is so fleeting as to be difficult to capture. Each
of the criticisms are called into question by programmatic
research in organizational psychology that will be de-
scribed in the remainder of this paper.
Organizational relevant behavior
Social psychologists who have compared the effect of a
primed goal with a consciously set goal typically set the
latter in general rather than specific terms (e.g., lose
weight vs. lose 15 pounds within 3 months). Consequent-
ly, Stajkovic et al. [19] conducted a laboratory experiment
on a brainstorming task where a goal was primed and a
specific challenging goal was consciously set. Consistent
with Bargh [20], the prime involved making achieve-
ment related sentences from scrambled words. Consistent
with GST and the AM, a main effect was obtained for
both the consciously set specific challenging goal and the
primed goal on the number of ideas generated.
Shantz and Latham [21] extended these findings to a
natural setting by giving employees in a call center the
same instructions, prepared by management, to solicit
money from potential donors. On the basis of a pilot
study, the prime chosen was a backdrop of a photograph
of a woman winning a race.1 In line with Bargh’s findings
and GST, a main effect for both goals was obtained for the
amount of money raised as recorded by the center’s
computer. Two exact replications of the prime-perfor-
mance relationship in two additional call centers provide
unambiguous support for this finding [22]. The duration
of the task in these three experiments was a 3–4 hour
work shift as opposed to 3–4 min or less in many social
psychology experiments.
To remove doubt as to whether these results were due to
experimenter bias or demand effects, a fourth field ex-
periment was conducted in still another call center [23].
Whereas one of the authors (Shantz) was present in the
previous three call centers to ensure the manager ran-
domly assigned employees to conditions, no experiment-
er was present in this one. To remove doubt as to whether
1
Pavio [31,32] found that behavior is affected by a cognitive system
that is more responsive to pictures than words. Choosing pictures can be
readily applied to priming a goal in organizational settings.
Current Opinion in Psychology 2016, 12:85–88
the effect of the primed goal–job performance relation-
ship is at best short-term, this experiment was conducted
for an entire 4-day work week. In addition, the TAT, a
projective measure, was used to determine whether the
goal was primed in the subconscious.2
This experiment involved an exact replication in that it
included the same prime, the same type of work setting,
the same procedure, and the same dependent variable
that had been used in the previous three call centers. It
also involved a conceptual replication in that it included a
photograph of employees making telephone calls. This
was done to test a core tenet of GST, namely, that a
specific, in this case a context specific goal, is superior to a
general one (i.e., the winning racer) for increasing subse-
quent job performance. Again the results were not only
statistically significant, they had practical significance as
well. Consistent with GST, 16% more money was raised
in the context specific primed goal condition than that
which was raised in the general primed goal condition,
and 85% more money than was raised by employees in the
control condition. Employees who were primed with the
racer raised 60% more money than those in the control
group.
In none of these four field experiments were the employ-
ees aware of the primed goal–job performance relation-
ship. This was evident from their responses to the funnel
debriefing developed by Bargh et al. [24] and from their
surprise and laughter when informed of the relationship at
the end of the debriefing.
The Linguistic Inventory Word Count [25] was used to
assess the employees written responses to the TAT. As
hypothesized, both the context specific and the general
prime resulted in more achievement related words than
the control condition. In addition, the context specific
prime elicited more work-related words than was the case
in the other two conditions.
Based on the results of a pilot study, Chen and Latham
[26] used a photograph of Rodin’s ‘The Thinker’ to
prime a learning goal for performing a knowledge acqui-
sition task. Consistent with experiments involving con-
sciously set goals (e.g., [12]), only the primed learning
goal led to an increase in performance relative to the
2
Locke [8] and I [33] prefer the term subconscious to unconscious.
The term unconscious was originally used by Freud to refer to informa-
tion that could never become conscious; it could only be inferred
through the analysis of dreams. Subconscious, as defined by Locke
and me, means information that is potentially conscious. It is material
stored in memory that can be brought into awareness. Bargh and
Morsella [34] reclaimed the term unconscious from Freud to simply
mean unintended effects or influences the actual cause of which the
individual is not aware. We agree with the definition, but use the term
subconscious to avoid confusion with the word unconscious as originally
used by Freud.
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primed performance goal (i.e., the racer) or the control
condition. This experiment is a conceptual replication of
the experiment by Dijksterhuis and van Knippenberg
[17]. In our experiment, the primes were photographs
rather than listing the characteristics of a professor or a
hooligan, and the dependent variable was knowledge
acquisition to perform the task effectively rather than
ascertaining the correct answer on a multiple choice test.
The results are the same, namely, people who were
primed with the mental representation of ‘hard thinking’
performed better than those in the other two conditions.
Ganegoda et al. [27] found that a consciously set goal and a
primed goal for fairness had an additive effect on counter-
acting the self-serving tendencies that typically arise
during negotiations. The prime occurred through a search
for 13 words, 8 of which were fairness related, in a word
matrix. The mediator was found to be justice saliency.
Similarly, in another laboratory experiment [28], the
scrambled word sentence technique was used to prime
ethical behavior. The mediator was the activation of an
individual’s moral standards. As noted earlier, both the
GST and the AM stress the importance of an individual’s
values on goal pursuit. The moderator in this experiment
was performance monitoring such that the prime did not
affect behavior when the individual’s performance was
monitored.
All these experiments used a supraliminal prime. Zda-
niuk and Bobocel [29] had participants read a description
of a fair and unfair leader. Each description included a
photograph of the respective leader. They then sublimi-
nally presented participants with the face of a fair leader,
unfair leader, or a neutral face. Those who had been
presented with the face of the unfair leader subsequently
wrote an employee a dismissal letter that was less inter-
actionally fair than the participants in the other two
conditions.
These latter three experiments suggest that primed goals
can ensure that an increase in an individual’s performance
does not occur at the expense of appropriate or fair
behavior. The different methodologies and dependent
variables used to prime fairness suggest the robustness of
this conclusion.
Discussion
Five experiments conducted in laboratory settings
[19,26,27–29], four of which used a supraliminal prime
and one primed the goal subliminally, show that the
primed goal-organizational related behavior relationship
has internal validity and statistical significance. Four
experiments conducted in organizational settings
[21,23,22] show that this relationship has external
validity to the work place, and in addition to statistical
significance, has practical significance as well.
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Goal setting: a possible theoretical framework Latham 87
The rival hypothesis that these findings are due to a
methodological artifact can be rejected on the basis of
the multiple methods for priming a goal (i.e., photograph,
scrambled words, discerning words in a matrix, and a
subliminal prime).
The exact replications of the primed goal–performance
relationship in four different call centers in three geo-
graphical areas (Ontario, Quebec, Florida) where the same
prime was used, the same task was performed by employ-
ees in the same industry, and the same dependent variable
was measured suggest the robustness of the findings. The
conceptual replications suggest their generalizability.
That the dependent variable in the four field experiments
was an objective measure, money, measured by each
center’s computer, eliminates the rival hypothesis of
supervisor subjectivity in the evaluation an employee’s
performance contaminating this measure, or experiment-
er bias. The four field experiments, particularly Latham
and Piccolo [23], also show that experimenter bias,
demand effects, and participant awareness do not explain
the results. In addition, the results were shown to be by
no means short-term, as the effect was shown to last for a
4-day work week.
A limitation of these experiments on organizational-related
behavior is that the focus has been on identifying different
types of dependent variables that can be influenced by a
prime. Only two experiments identified a mediator [27,28],
and only one identified a moderator [28]. The AM provid-
ed the framework for conducting this research, but it has
yet to be elevated to a theory that specifies the moderators
regarding the boundaries or conditional variables for the
causal relationships as well as the mediators that explain
those relationships. The results of these experiments,
however, suggest the benefit of integrating the AM and
the GST for improving organizational behavior. Consistent
with the AM’s statement that a primed goal and a con-
sciously set goal predict the same phenomena and bring
about the same outcomes, a primed goal and a specific,
high goal in the experiments reviewed here (e.g., [21,27])
had additive effects on the performance of the same tasks.
Consistent with GST, a context specific primed goal led to
higher performance than a general prime or a control
condition [23]. Consistent with empirical research on
GST, a learning goal that was primed led to significantly
higher performance on a knowledge acquisition task than a
performance goal that was primed [26]. With regard to
moderators, as previously noted, both GST and the AM
state that only when the situation allows will goal pursuit
occur, and then only if the goal is important to the
individual. Future research in organizational psychology
should now investigate other GST mediators (choice,
effort, persistence) and moderators (e.g., goal commit-
ment, feedback) to explain when and why a primed goal
affects behavior.
Current Opinion in Psychology 2016, 12:85–88
88 Social priming
Conflict of interest statement
Nothing declared.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank John Bargh for his helpful comments on an
earlier version of this manuscript. The writing of this paper was funded in
part by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC),
Canada.
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