Six of the company’s logging operations in Oklahoma ran the same way. Each had six to ten people. Some felled trees, some dragged them to a landing, some loaded them onto trucks, and drivers took each load to the mill, where it was weighed and unloaded.
Loading took judgment. A full legal load could be anywhere from 60 to 120 logs, and every tree differed in length and diameter, so how many to put on, and which ones, was a call made at the landing. The drivers were paid by the hour.
According to Edwin Locke and Gary Latham’s later account, the trucks were arriving at the mill loaded to about 60 percent of the legal allowable weight.
Latham and J. James Baldes, whose 1975 paper gives their address as the Weyerhaeuser Company in Tacoma, Washington, set out to test Locke’s theory of goal setting in the woods. The theory held that specific, hard goals beat vague ones, and critics had asked whether it held in industry. The paper put “practical significance” in quotation marks in its title. Statistical significance, it says, “is only one step.” What counted was whether a goal changed behavior enough to matter to the organization.
So the drivers were assigned a specific, hard goal for the net weight of their loads. The researchers recorded the net weight of 36 trucks for 12 consecutive months and compared the loads after the goal with the same trucks’ record before it. The paper’s abstract reports that performance “improved immediately upon the assignment of a specific hard goal.”
In their 2002 retrospective, Locke and Latham describe the drivers as unionized and say the loads rose from 60 to 90 percent of the legal allowable weight. The drivers also changed their equipment: they modified their trucks so that they could better estimate the weight before driving to the weighing station.
The paper put a price on the change. By the company’s cost accounting, getting the same increase without goal setting would have meant spending about a quarter of a million dollars on extra trucks alone. In the 2002 account, the drivers saved the company $250,000 in nine months.
The design has a limit worth knowing. The trucks after the goal were compared with their own past, not with a group of trucks left without one, and a before-and-after comparison can’t by itself rule out other changes made at the same time.
A later study with Weyerhaeuser drivers went further. By Locke and Latham’s account, unionized drivers were assigned a goal for the number of daily trips they made to the mill, and that one saved $2.7 million in 18 weeks.