Personal Goals and Organizational Goals

People often choose a lower income to work in the not-for-profit world for personal reasons. This desire to be a part of something bigger, to make a difference, is something organizations may be able to tap into if their company vision is aligned with an employee's personal ambitions. Once this phenomenon is understood, it can be translated into a language that would help organizations understand how to harness this personal drive and intrinsic motivation.

The engagement and motivation of individuals who have a personal purpose or personal goals that can be accomplished through the work they do for an organization appears to be powerful and, once understood, could lead to a more flexible and personalized style of leadership. If an organization has a higher purpose vision that attracts employees with a vision symbiotic with that of the business, many of the traditional forms of external motivation may not be appropriate. By understanding why and what motivates task oriented vs. socio-emotional people to make decisions, a leader can apply the levers that trigger self-motivation instead of relying on a one size fits all.

A leader could increase motivation and engagement by providing alignment, resources and support in the form and perspective best understood and desired by each employee, then stepping away and allowing the employee to access and pull from the personal drive that comes from achieving their own aspirational purpose or goals in life. Similar to the conductor of an orchestra, the leader's primary duties would be to unify the organization, set the pace and tempo, and then listen, observe and direct as necessary to assure the organization is moving in the right direction. Employees who work for an organization that has a higher purpose, and are led by leaders who understand their drivers, can feel fulfilled and motivated as they use many of their waking hours to work toward their personal calling or purpose. At the end of the day, they can feel that their efforts were toward creating and supporting their ideal self, not the "ought self", desired by someone else.

Future Research

This study was done within for-profit organizations, but the indications that symbiotic visions impact people in different ways is strong enough that it would be illuminating to do similar research in not-for-profit organizations to understand the similarities and differences.

This study illuminates the possible benefits of connecting to an individual's aspirational purpose or goals in a meaningful way through the related task positive vs. socio-emotional construct. Future research should be done specifically on goal vs. purpose drivers. To do this, clarification of the terms would need to be done to create unbiased and other determined classifications. Even with the limitations of this study, two categories emerged. Future research should be done on how to connect one's personal purpose and goals to a company's higher purpose and how to fit it into current and developing leadership theory.

There is work being done to understand what leaders need to do to motivate and engage their employees. Further research could be done to understand the correlation between leadership theories and the follower's response. The discovery of an analytical vs. empathetic tension is very important to understanding how followers make decisions. This research supports this theory and may be able to extend it to understand if this is a two dimensional framework or a continuum impacted by one's motivational driver. More research should be done to understand this relationship and the implications to leadership and communication styles.

Although both groups referenced the importance of relationships, 50% of the task focused group spoke about their identification with teams compared with no one in the socio-emotional group referencing teams or the personal identity associated with a team. Relationships were explored in the context of this study only to understand if they existed or were absent. Additional research would have to be done to understand the role team identities play in task-positive vs. socio-emotional decision styles.

Limitations

Because this was an empirical study, possible meanings of these discoveries must be inferred in light of former research. Additional studies will be needed to truly comprehend and test these interpretations.

The study was exploratory in nature and designed to discover the role of personal purpose and personal goals when a symbiotic relationship with a higher purpose company vision and positive relationships existed or was absent. Therefore, interviews were conducted with senior leaders that were considered high performers in organizations that had a recognized higher purpose vision. The study does not consider what happens when high-performing employees have a personal purpose but work within an organization that does not have a higher purpose vision, or what happens when employees are not senior leaders in the organization nor are considered high-performers. More research would need to be done before this could be applied to the greater employee population.

This study does not assume that personal purpose is stable. Personal purpose and goals can evolve and change over time. This study only captures a point in time in which the senior leaders interviewed identified with the higher purpose vision of their organization.

This study does not imply that goal-driven or purpose-driven tendencies are good or bad, simply different drivers. I purposefully did not provide clear definitions of both terms prior to the interviews in order to not bias the selection of the participants or the direction of the responses to the questions. The apparent bias against being goal based and various understandings of the meaning of being purpose driven created a limitation. I mediated this limitation by using an already existing construct to categorize the themes that emerged based on Saldana's approach to allowing conceptual frameworks to emerge in the coding process and therefore, identifying groups associated with these frameworks. I used the first question to place people into groups that were defined by prior research on the topic of motivational drivers. I recommend that it be verified through another study that provides more clarification on the difference between the two drivers.

A fourth limitation is that all of the interviews were done with people in leadership positions. I recommend that a similar study be done of individuals not in leadership positions to understand if that variable impacts the findings.