In the contemporary business world, “purpose” has become the ultimate buzzword. We are often told that organizations must transcend profit maximization to embrace values that promote the well-being of society and the environment. For a nimble start-up founded on social principles, this is natural territory. But what happens when an established, traditional organization—with decades of history, entrenched routines, and a legacy of technical efficiency—attempts to redefine its core commitments to become more responsible and connected to social change?
Our new study, “Bridging Moral Aspirations and the Mundane Reality: A Grounded Study of the Process of Radical Purpose Adaptation in a Business School,” published in the Journal of Management Studies, pulls back the curtain on this complex process. Through an in-depth analysis of a prestigious European business school, we reveal that transforming an organization’s purpose is not a linear journey. It is a messy, recursive struggle to bridge high-minded moral aspirations with the mundane reality of daily operations.
Beyond defending the Legacy
Research on organizational purpose has mostly viewed this concept through a backward-looking perspective. In this traditional view, purpose is a set of historical values that leaders must defend from “drift” or hijacking by private interests.
In our research, we suggest a complementary perspective rooted in a contemporary corporate example. Often, the challenge is not defending a legacy but imagining and integrating novel commitments to make the organization responsive to new emerging societal expectations. This is critical for business schools, which have long been criticized for promoting management ideals that ignore stakeholder concerns, resulting in destructive behaviors toward communities and the environment.
In 2020, the Business School’s leadership recognized that their traditional model—churning out efficient managers—was insufficient for a world facing new threats and opportunities, along with a growing concern about environmental and social issues, such as climate change and inequality. They initiated a process of “radical purpose adaptation”: a deliberate effort to change the organization’s reason for being to connect to contemporary calls for more responsible and more (positively) impactful management education.
The honeymoon phase: proactive purpose work
The transformation began with proactive purpose work, consisting of theorization and integration.
First, leadership engaged in theorization, articulating a vision where the school would “empower leaders to drive sustainable innovation”. This was an existential shift intended to move the school from a “factory of efficiency” to a “motor of positive change”.
Second, they moved to integration. To make abstract goals tangible, they built a “purpose architecture”. They redesigned the MBA curriculum to focus on human awareness and even physically restructured the campus. In new buildings, floors were named after values like “Act,” “Bridge,” and “Inspire” to literally cement the new purpose into the walls.
The clash: purpose precariousness
If the story ended there, it would be a standard case of change management. But our research highlights that proactive work inevitably triggers purpose precariousness. High moral ideals caused significant friction when they rubbed against the “mundane reality” of the organization.
We identified two types of precariousness:
1. Purpose-embedding precariousness. External stakeholders were cynical. Shareholders and alumni feared that a focus on “humanism” would dilute technical rigor and damage rankings. For example, some prospective students were concerned that such emphasis on humanistic perspective could overshadow academic rigor or the depth of analysis of technical aspects. Likewise, some faculty members feared that the emphasis on sustainability could damage the organization’s economic outlook. The market demanded efficiency, while the new purpose demanded morality, threatening to delegitimize the transformation.
2. Purpose-embodying precariousness. Internally, employees felt squeezed between moral aspirations and operational pressures to deliver financial results. The purpose felt like a superficial coat of paint over the same old grinding machine. Faculty noted the hypocrisy: “Call it however you want, we are just doing EBITDA”. Others felt the new “purpose language” was cult-like, while the reality of receiving demanding emails at 11:00 PM contradicted stated values of “respectful partnership”.
Saving the transformation: reactive purpose work
Facing skepticism, the Business School did not abandon the project. Instead, they engaged in reactive purpose work to stabilize the organization.
To counter external cynicism, leaders performed enrolling purpose work. They sought external validation, such as B-Corp certification, to prove their commitment was measurable and not just “purpose-washing”. They also organized summits with other deans to collectively redefine the purpose of management education, effectively changing the rules of the game.
To heal the internal divide, leaders engaged in stabilizing purpose work through two key moves:
- Aligning systems: They stopped relying solely on rhetoric and altered the “mundane” infrastructure. Most notably, they operationalizes the new values into measurable objectives, and integrated such new metrics into the incentive scheme offered to managers and employees. This signaled that purpose was not just a poster on the wall, but a metric that affected the wallet.
- Framing purpose as flexible: Leaders shifted gears, conceiving the purpose as a flexible framework rather than a rigid ideology. They gave employees autonomy to interpret values in their own way, engaging them in various workshops aimed at exploring openly the implications of the new values for innovation and change. This allowed staff to move from performative compliance to genuine engagement.
Key takeaways for practice
Our study offers three critical lessons for organizational managers and leaders, even beyond the context of higher education, attempting or contributing to their own organization’s radical purpose adaptation process:
- Align incentives: High moral aspirations will always clash with financial targets. You cannot “communicate” your way out of this; you must structurally align incentives (like bonuses) to the new purpose.
- Allow flexibility: If you force a specific moral language too hard, employees will reject it as inauthentic. Allow your teams the flexibility to interpret the purpose in a way that fits their specific reality.
- Leverage standards: Use certifications (like B-Corp) to prove to cynical shareholders that the new direction is authentic, legitimate, and rigorous
