When Academics Go Wild: A Scholarly Scuffle

We recently featured in this space an academic paper called Goals Gone Wild, research on what the authors fear is an unhealthy reliance by managers on goal setting. Case in point: The Ford Pinto. Management declared the car had to come in under 2,000 pounds and under $2,000. The designers met the goals by, in part, placing the gas tank in a particularly vulnerable spot. And explode Pintos did when they were rear-ended.

But another explosion occurred after the research report's authors, who include HBS professor Max Bazerman, published their work. That's when scholars Edwin Locke and Gary Latham responded in the Academy of Management Perspectives with their own catchily-titled work, Has Goal Setting Gone Wild, or Have Its Attackers Abandoned Good Scholarship?
Locke and Latham took the original team to task for what they said was an over-reliance on anecdotal evidence and generally poor scholarship. But it got a little nasty, especially for a dispute in an academic journal, when L&L wrote:"(The authors) would do well to abandon their roles as reporters with an axe to grind and embrace good scholarship." Them's fighting words in academia.

What drew their interest? Locke and Latham have spent many years doing seminal research on goal setting, and some of their work was taken to task in the paper by the Goals Gone Wild crew. They wanted to set the record straight.

Now Bazerman and fellow authors Lisa D. Ordóñez, Maurice E. Schweitzer, and Adam D. Galinsky have replied with On Good Scholarship, Goal Setting, and Scholars Gone Wild. A sample:

"When Locke and Latham accuse scholars who raise legitimate concerns about their favorite theory of having 'breached the principles of good scholarship' they cause harm to the 'dispassionate' approach to research they purportedly endorse and to good scholarship more generally."

So even in the ivory towers of academia, passions run high and debates can be much more than academic.