One afternoon in 1971, Greg Oldham, then a doctoral student at Yale, walked into
Richard Hackman’s faculty oYce and announced that we had a relationship problem.
Richard was taken aback because he thought the relationship was excellent. In
his view, Greg was well-launched on his own research trajectory, having recently
completed a Wne pre-dissertation project on leadership and goal setting. It was just
the kind of mentoring relationship Richard most valued: Greg autonomously had
developed a research question about a phenomenon that interested him and, with
only modest coaching, had designed, executed, andwritten up an excellent empirical
study. Richard thought that Greg was now well positioned to develop a dissertation
proposal that would signiWcantly advance understanding of his phenomenon.
The conversation, as best as we can reconstruct it more than three decades later,
unfolded as follows: