Personal Goals and Organizational Goals
When considering leadership goal setting, one must also consider how your personal goals align with the business' goals. In addition, it is essential to consider how your employee's goals align with the organizational vision. This resource will address motivation in the context of goal alignment between the leader, followers, and the organization.
Literature Review
The understanding of purpose has evolved quite significantly over the past 60 years. Prior to the 1959 publication of Frankl's book Man's Search for Meaning, purpose and meaning were understood to be a way of adapting and not as a motivator toward change. Frankl was the first to identify purpose and meaning as more than derivatives of motivation by recognizing them as the drivers used to overcome circumstances.
Personal purpose, meaning and calling are often interrelated, and/or used interchangeably with each other. Elangovan et al. indicates that purpose and calling hold many of the same attributes, such as hope and a focus on others, based on an inner desire to stay true to oneself and to do the right thing, make the world a better place or pursue a well-meaning goal. When working toward a "calling," one receives personal gratification and a sense of personal purpose. It is personal and the tasks are more enriching, which is intellectually and emotionally stimulating. McKnight and Kashdan describe purpose as a "centralized, self-organizing life aim that organizes and stimulates goals, manages behaviors, and provides a sense of meaning". Whereas, a calling is thought to be bestowed upon one by a higher power or a response to a strong inner passion, and a purpose is discovered or found, calling and purpose both drive action and define one's identity.
Recent research has made some progress deconstructing and discerning meaning and purpose. Rainey cited much of the research already referenced as well as work by Heintzelman and King, Hicks, Cicero, Trent, Curton, and King, and Rockind to conclude that the "two are distinct phenomena that differ in their orientation toward cognition or action and in their temporal framing. Meaning and purpose are separate, albeit highly related, constructs that build off of one another so as to contribute to the broader concept of the 'good,' or meaningful life". This deconstruction connects meaning to an integration of the past, present, and future whereas purpose is a future directed element of meaning that may not integrate past and present.
In addition to being future directed, the construct of purpose is becoming more understood to include doing something that a person feels driven to do in which the benefactor or benefactors are not themselves. Damon et al. characterized a sense of purpose as denoting a course that is personally meaningful and beneficial to the greater society.
In this study, I sought to explore the impact of purpose, separate from both a calling from a higher source and making meaning through an integration of past experiences, while still holding to the elements of purpose that appear to have consistently emerged in psychological literature. For this study, I defined personal purpose as: a deliberate choice to pursue a future directed intention that is personally meaningful, and beneficial to the greater society, that influences one's goals and behaviors.