Middle Managers Could Be the Key to Effective Corporate Purpose

Corporate purpose has become one of the most debated ideas in business. Supporters argue that a clear purpose helps attract talent, motivate employees and improve performance. Critics dismiss it as little more than a public-relations exercise. Yet both sides tend to focus on the same people: CEOs and senior executives.

What happens on the front line

Doctoral graduate Pauline Asmar and Professor Rodolphe Durand take a different approach. Rather than examining what leaders say at the top of organizations, they look at what happens inside teams. Their research, published in Long Range Planning, analyzed 57,440 employee observations and 15,315 team-level observations, collected across 469 companies and 31 industries. The results suggest that the success or failure of corporate purpose may depend less on mission statements than on conversations taking place much closer to the front line.

The researchers call this process “purpose dialogue.” Unlike a corporate purpose statement, which is usually crafted by senior management, purpose dialogue happens between managers and employees. It involves discussing how a team’s work contributes to the broader direction of the company and inviting employees to share whether that direction feels meaningful and engaging.

Asmar argues that this distinction matters because employees do not experience corporate purpose through annual reports or executive speeches. They experience it through their daily work. “Middle managers are really translators of words into actions,” she explained on the day of her graduation from HEC Paris. They help employees understand how individual tasks contribute to larger goals, she continued, and create a bridge between top management and the people carrying out the work.

Defining purpose dialogue

The numbers suggest this translation role is far from trivial. The study finds that a one-standard-deviation increase in purpose dialogue was associated with an increase of between 3.4% and 10.5% in team commitment. Teams reported stronger identification with their work, greater willingness to contribute and a stronger sense of belonging.

One of the most striking findings is what purpose dialogue is not. The researchers tested an alternative leadership style based on giving directions and closely monitoring employees. Rather than strengthening commitment, this directive approach was associated with lower levels of team commitment. In other words, purpose appears to work best as a conversation rather than a command.

The finding resonates with a question that motivated Asmar’s work from the beginning. Is corporate purpose genuinely changing organizations, or is it simply another management fad? “I wanted to understand whether it does anything beyond looking good on the website,” she said. “I wanted to see if companies were hypocrites or if they were actually genuine.”

Connecting work with a firm’s larger mission

Her conclusion is nuanced. Purpose can be meaningful, but only when employees see evidence that the organization lives up to its promises. A company may claim to exist for something greater than profit, but employees continuously compare those claims with reality. When actions and words diverge, credibility suffers.

This is one reason why managers play such a critical role. Employees often know little about corporate strategy. Many are focused on serving customers, helping patients, producing goods, solving problems or completing tasks. Managers help connect those activities to the organization’s larger mission. Asmar offers a simple example: an accountant working for a healthcare company may not immediately see how balancing budgets contributes to saving lives. A manager who explains that connection can make the work feel more meaningful.

The research also highlights the importance of fairness. Teams benefited less from purpose dialogue when managers maintained very different relationships with different employees. When some employees felt favored while others felt excluded, commitment suffered. People became less receptive to messages about purpose because they questioned the fairness of the environment in which those messages were delivered.

The astronaut and the janitor

This finding helps explain why two apparently similar companies can achieve very different results. It is not enough to have a purpose statement. The purpose must be communicated consistently, reinforced through behavior and embedded within teams. Even within the same organization, some teams may develop strong commitment while others remain disengaged depending on how managers communicate and whether employees trust them.

Asmar often returns to a famous NASA story explored by researcher Adam Carton. A janitor reportedly described his role not as cleaning floors but as helping put a man on the moon. Whether apocryphal or not, the story captures the essence of purpose dialogue. People want to understand how their work contributes to something larger than themselves.

That desire may be particularly important today. Employees are increasingly skeptical of corporate rhetoric. High-profile scandals, accusations of greenwashing and growing demands for transparency have made many workers wary of grand claims. Asmar understands the skepticism. “People are not blind,” she says. “They see when companies are not doing what they say they are doing.”

The lesson for leaders is straightforward. Purpose must be translated into everyday decisions, conversations and behaviors or it loses its very raison d’être. If managers help employees see how their work contributes to a meaningful objective, commitment grows. If purpose remains disconnected from reality, employees eventually stop believing it.

For organizations seeking to build stronger teams, the message seems to be that purpose does not live in the boardroom. It lives - or dies - in the conversations managers have every day.