Unconscious Goal Pursuit in Real‐Life Organizations: Commentary on Chen, Latham, Piccolo, and Itzchakov (2020)

The research reviewed in Chen et al.’s (this issue) meta‐analysis shows that a person’s goal pursuits and motivational states can be induced by external means, or ‘primes’, and then operate in much the same way as if the person made a conscious intention to pursue that goal. Previous demonstrations of this phenomena in psychology laboratories are now extended to real life organizations and settings and shown to produce even stronger effects than...