Edwin A. Locke

Edwin A. Locke, born May 15, 1938, is an American psychologist and a retired Deans Professor of Motivation and Leadership at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, College Park. With Gary Latham he developed goal setting theory, one of the most extensively validated frameworks in industrial organizational psychology, concerning how specific and challenging goals affect work motivation and performance. The Association for Psychological Science has described him as the most published organizational psychologist in the history of the field, and his other work has examined job satisfaction and challenged claims made for the concept of emotional intelligence.