Enacting Company Purpose in Practice: Case Study in a Finnish Multinational Corporation

To date, interesting cases have been made on the importance and advantages of a clear and compelling company purpose and the need to connect it to solving a problem of people and planet. Yet, there is little clarification of how purpose should be put into action. Therefore, the objective of this thesis is to understand how a company purpose can be enacted in practice, helping to understand how to govern a purpose. The study enlightens how employees understand a company purpose, how the purpose is visible in practice and what outcomes a clear and compelling purpose can have. The empirical part of this research was conducted as an intensive case study of a company purpose in a company that has recently redefined its purpose. In order to get a deep understanding of this specific case, we conducted 10 semi-structured interviews with employees of the case company. In addition, we collected secondary data from the case company´s online sources. A qualitative approach was used due to the philosophical positioning of our research. Our epistemological starting point of subjectivism guided us to conduct qualitative interviews with the employees since we believe that knowledge of the company purpose and how it is enacted is only available through social actors. Based on our analysis, we can offer three main insights on how a company purpose is enacted in practice. First, for the purpose to be enacted in practice, individuals need to know and understand the purpose. The company purpose is the reason why the company exists, who it serves and what problems it aims to solve, and its understanding is fostered with wide communication and two-way dialogue. The key is that the purpose is clear, relatable and both managers and employees believe in it. Secondly, the purpose is enacted by putting it into the center of the company strategy, decision-making and other management tools such vision and mission. The purpose is visible in practice when all the actions such as resource allocation, research and development and product offering are driving towards the purpose. Thirdly, the purpose guides the decision-making and daily actions of the individual employees. At its best, the purpose can be a source of meaningfulness and motivate the employees to voluntary put more effort into their work, further fueling the enactment of purpose in practice