Why We Can't Always Establish Shared Goals on Projects

Abstract

For a project to be successful team members must be aligned with each other on their goal. The purpose of this study was to understand how a cross-functional project team engages in accepting a project goal as real. We framed our study using shared reality theory and a qualitative approach to analyze the video and audio recorded meetings of three cross-functional project teams over a four-month period in a mid-sized private fintech firm. We proposed that the establishment of a goal as a project teams reality requires the integration of functional and organizational identity for the project team to align. We found that when teams faced events of uncertainty related to their goal, the team that had integrated their goal as reality had reconciled identity. Teams that had not accepted their goal as reality engaged in continuous interpretations of an events meaning and challenged each other’s functional identity. Given this validation we then examined how the goal aligned with the organization’s identity in the form of their mission statement. We found that the team’s inability to create a shared goal was because the goal itself conflicted with the organization’s identity. Functional team members have an identity that is partially supported by this identity rendering the integration of the goal as reality impossible. The findings of this study contribute an important understanding about the interrelationship between organizational goals and identity alignment. It exposes the critical role goal formation plays in maintaining a coherent organizational story so that functional team members may correctly act their part. This research also extends goal theory by considering the implications of the relational context of a goal within the organizational context.