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The authors summarize 35 years of empirical research on goal-setting theory. They describe the core findings of the theory, the mechanisms by which goals operate, moderators of goal effects, the relation of goals and satisfaction, and the role of goals as mediators of incentives. The external validity and practical significance of goal-setting theory are explained, and new directions in goal-setting research are discussed. The relationships of goal setting to other theories are described as are the theory’s limitations.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the study of motivation in North American psychology was not considered a respectable pursuit. The field was dominated by behaviorists, and“motivation” was argued by them to lie outside the person in the form of reinforcers and punishers. When internal mechanisms were acknowledged, as in drive reduction theory, it was said that they were primarily physiological.

McClelland, a nonbehaviorist, argued for the existence of internal motives, such as need for achievement, but these were asserted to be subconscious (McClelland, Atkinson, Clark, & Lowell, 1953) and hence measurable only by projective tests. Behaviorists, drive reductionists, and advocates of subconscious motives all agreed that introspection was not a valid method of understanding human motivation. This ruled out the possibility of studying the conscious regulation of action.

An exception to the anticonsciousness zeitgeist was the work of Ryan. Anticipating the cognitive revolution in psychology, Ryan (1970) argued that“it seems a simple fact that human behavior is affected by conscious purposes, plans, intentions, tasks and the like” (p. 18). For Ryan, these, which he called first-level explanatory concepts, were the immediate motivational causes of most human action.

Lewin and his colleagues (e.g., Lewin, Dembo, Festinger, & Sears, 1944) studied conscious goals, or levels of aspiration, years prior to Ryan’s work. However, they treated levels of aspiration as a dependent rather than...