Document Type
Article
Publication Date
10-1-2014
Abstract
It is believed that symbiotic visions can drive employees and organizations toward a common objective based on the premise that people will attain a higher level of motivation and engagement when they are working toward a personal purpose. The field of organizational development has been aspiring to help organizations and people align their vision for decades without much, if any, empirical support for the assumption that alignment helps. This qualitative study examines the impact of a company's aspirational vision statement, or higher purpose, on motivating and engaging employees. The presence and lack of congruency between senior managers' personal callings and their company's vision was examined. One observation was that most senior managers within organizations with a well-developed and widely known higher purpose vision have personal goals or a personal purpose. When alignment is felt through the sense of the greater purpose, there is a deep, almost spiritual, commitment to making the world a better place and helping the organization be a contributing part of that. When alignment is felt through the organization's alignment to one's personal goals or values, there is a great sense of commitment, but a clear delineation between work and life ambitions. One of the key findings is that personal purpose and company vision alignment does appear to drive motivation and engagement, but in different ways, depending on whether a person is primarily purpose driven or goal driven. It was observed that some of these executives had a deep and far reaching sense of purpose which seemed tied to driving the intent of the organization's higher purpose vision. Others had a goal-oriented way of describing their purpose which appeared more instrumental in helping move the organization toward its overall objectives and purpose.
Keywords
organizational behavior, management, Weatherhead School of Management, purpose, higher purpose, calling, meaning, vision, shared vision, motivation, engagement, relationships
Rights
© The Author(s). This is an open access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Department/Center
Design & Innovation
Recommended Citation
Berg, Jodi, "The Impact of Symbiotic Visions: Increasing Engagement and Motivation Through Vision Alignment" (2014). Student Scholarship. 456.
https://commons.case.edu/studentworks/456