American psychologist Edwin Locke from the University of Maryland at College Park has studied the power of goal setting since the late 1960s. He first posited that employees were motivated by goals and feedback in his 1968 article "Toward a Theory of Task Motivation and Incentives." He later fine-tuned his perspective to include that the difficulty and specificity of the task also was a good predictor of performance. In other words, if the goal was too easy, the motivation wasn't as compelling. Along with Dr. Gary Latham, Dr. Locke published his groundbreaking work in 1990 in a book called "A Theory of Goal Setting and Task Performance," which frequently is cited by business administrators, Ph.D. students, lecturers and