How Purpose-Driven Organizations Influenced Corporate Actions and Employee Trust during the Global COVID-19 Pandemic

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 global pandemic drove many companies to reevaluate their approach to business and, as a result, some focused their efforts on leading with purpose. Purpose is an organization's fundamental goal that goes beyond profit maximization. It is an all-encompassing principle that guides everything the organization does and determines its strategies. Effective strategic communication is an essential element of purpose as it can empower employees to align their personal goals with organizational values and thus more closely identify with their organization. However, while the benefits of purpose are frequently proclaimed in practical literature, the impact of communicating purpose on employee outcomes remains unexplored in strategic communication research. To address this critical research gap, this study examined why and how communicating purpose could be an effective tactic in strategic communication. Specifically, this study introduced the concept of purpose and examined how purpose directed organizations’ actions in response to COVID-19 as well as the impact of purpose on employees’ organizational identification and trust. The findings offer practical implications regarding the importance of strategic communication about purpose in terms of building employee organizational identification and trust during times of change.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Responses that were finished under four minutes were eliminated. In addition, responses with straight-lining issues and didn't answer the reverse-coded question in a consistent way were excluded from the dataset.

² The EFA result was considered acceptable based on the criteria from Field (2013) (i.e., retained factors should have at least three items with a loading greater than 0.4) and Awang et al. (2016) (i.e., for newly developed items, the factor loading for every item should exceed 0.5).

³ Two error covariances were added among the measurement items of purpose-driven organization (c = .35; .42). Two error covariances were added among the measurement items of organizational identification (c = .30; .30). One error covariance was added among the measurement items of employee trust toward the organization (c = .23).

⁴ The factor loadings were considered acceptable based on the criteria from Hulland (1999) which specified that factor loadings should be greater than 0.5.