Marya Hill-Popper Besharov
Organizational Behavior PhD
Dissertation Chair: Prof. P. Marsden
Mission Goes Corporate: Understanding Employee Behavior in a Mission-Driven Business
A growing number of for-profit businesses now espouse social missions in addition to the traditional goal of profit maximization. Such firms combine the use of motivational systems based on purposive incentives and attachment to the mission, typically found in non-profit and voluntary organizations, with elements of bureaucratic control systems common in conventional for-profit businesses, such as standardization, division of labor, and material incentives. Although it has been argued that mission-driven businesses have the potential to generate higher levels of discretionary effort and commitment from employees who attach to the mission, little empirical work has been done to understand how such firms operate and how the mission affects employee behavior or organizational performance.
My dissertation addresses these issues through a multi-site field study of a mission-driven business, Whole Foods Market. Using data from interviews, observations, and surveys, I examine the importance of mission to employees and the consequences for behavior and attachment to the firm.
I find that there is variation in the extent to which the mission matters to employees and that these differences in mission valence result in behaviors and attachment processes that do not always support organizational goals. Consistent with research on non-profit organizations, I find that employees who care about the mission engage in discretionary behaviors that advance the firm's social goals. However, attachment to the mission is not necessarily associated with attachment to the firm, so that employees who care deeply about the mission may resist organizational routines designed to improve efficiency in the achievement of both social and profit goals and may ultimately become disillusioned with the firm. On the other hand, employees for whom the mission is unimportant are more likely to accept the use of bureaucratic controls. Because some activities by which the mission is carried out have been routinized and incorporated into the organization's bureaucratic system of control, these employees are still engaged in carrying out the mission. Moreover, engaging in these required mission-related activities can initiate a conversion process by which initially uncommitted employees become more attached to the mission over time.
The hybrid control system achieves some of the motivational benefits of mission-based control as well as some of the efficiency gains from routinization and bureaucratic control, but these benefits come at a cost. Because the system relies in part on employee attachment to the mission, which is not necessarily associated with attachment to the firm, it is subject to hold-up by employees who care deeply about the mission, and it therefore remains somewhat outside of the firm's control. In addition, variation in the importance of mission generates tensions between employees that threaten to disrupt the work of the organization. The findings have implications for the design of control systems as well as for the management of employees in mission-driven businesses and related settings.
