7.5.6 Keeping Theories Open-Ended
Although we presented our theory in 1990, after twenty-five years of research, we did not close the theory to further development. Today, some forty years after we started, we are still accumulating knowledge about goal setting. For example, since publication of the 1990 book, we have learned about the benefits of learning goals (Winters and Latham, 1996) as noted earlier; we have found that goals affect small venture growth over two and six year periods (Baum, Locke, and Smith, 2001; Baum and Locke, 2004) -the first macro level studies; we have studied the effects of goals on risk-taking (Knight, Durham, and Locke, 2001), and we have discovered an interactive relationship between subconsciously primed and consciously assigned goals (Stajkovic, Locke and Blair, 2004; see also Locke and Latham, 2004). We have also learned that goals may tempt some people to cheat (Schweitzer, Ordoดn˜ez, and Douma, 2004). These discoveries do not contradict earlier findings; they add knowledge