Corporate Culture as Praxis: From Purpose to Profit

Abstract

The concept of purpose is not antithetical to profit. A corporate culture that empowers meaningfulness produces dividends across the board: greater productivity, increased profits, decreased costs, and a system of activity that ties corporate managerial culture to tangible, enduring, and colossally positive human capital results. A well thought out and executed comprehensive system of values, beliefs and norms based on meaningfulness is the most powerful communication a company can choose about how it conducts business. Attempting to provide a company’s belief system using disconnected initiatives or a densely worded mission statement, most often estranged from an average worker’s daily activity, is likely to dilute work effort and commitment. Clear evidence is presented to prove that a strong corporate culture, with meaningfulness of work at its core, is a company’s most strategic asset that directly affects a company’s bottom line and creates an enduring and unique competitive advantage. Specific strategies to build, sustain, and measure a corporate culture within the framework of meaningfulness, where profit and purpose both thrive, are introduced. The positive outcomes of such a culture include significantly decreased workplace absenteeism, presenteeism, employee turnover, and workplace mental health costs, as well as increased profitability and customer satisfaction. Sustaining a meaningful culture can be efficiently managed through a “broaden- and-build” process, an outcome inherent in meaningful work which produces a network of positive emotions and personal resources that strengthens initiative, resilience, broadened attention and thinking that serve each employee well both within and outside the organization.