BM_IMD_REPORT-How-Authentic-is-your-Corporate-Purpose

More documents

Recommendations

Info

Differentiating Delivering Stewarding Dimension Embeddedness Long‐term Orientation Connectedness Description The company’s choices and actions are partly generated by the actions and expected behavior of other actors; thus, it remains close to its stakeholders who enable it to remain connected to the world around it. The company plans for the long term by focusing on long-run goals, understands the interdependence of current and future benefits, maintains a long‐term relationship. The company is anchored to a business context that transcends personal, organizational and geographic boundaries, and aims to contribute to societal wellbeing by protecting and improving the environment and quality of life of stakeholders while respecting values, norms and traditions. Delivering refers to how external constituents perceive a firm’s ability to maintain its commitments. It has two dimensions that come from the authentic marketing and communications literature. These dimensions are consistency and reliability and are defined as follows: Dimension Consistency Reliability Description The company honors its heritage, actively creating connections with its origins, and also creating an internal consistency and continuity that enables it to stay true to a clearly stated corporate purpose over time. The company consistently pursues its purpose over time, making reliable promises and delivering on them, no matter how challenging the business context, while either meeting or exceeding its stated objectives. Differentiating refers to the firm’s ability to be seen as unique and distinct from other firms in the marketplace. The three dimensions of differentiating – reputation, passion and originality – come from the authentic branding literature and are defined as follows: Dimension Reputation Passion Originality Description The company can gauge how outsiders are judging it, has a good reputation in the community, among customers and in the industry as a whole, is actively involved in the community and is known as a good place to work. The company has a sense of purpose that inspires passion and that people like, find important and in which they invest time and energy. The company appears highly motivated to excel in everything it does. The company has a unique corporate purpose that stands out because it is fresh, creative, original and different to that of other companies in the same industry, and it cannot be easily replicated. As discussed in Section 5, our confirmatory factor analysis established that each one of these twelve dimensions is an important determinant of an authentic corporate purpose. However, before proceeding with a more detailed discussion of the individual dimensions, we first highlight some more general themes that emerged from the quantitative study. 14
4. Survey Results and Key Findings 4.1 Response sample Appendices V, VI and VII present the characteristics of our executive respondents and the firms they represented. The executives were in the high middle to upper levels of management, with an average age of 51. The firms they represented were from a broad section of business an industry 4.2 The challenge of establishing an authentic corporate purpose Although we were able to identify the core dimensions of an authentic corporate purpose, on the whole, our research suggests that an authentic corporate purpose may in fact be a rather elusive concept. In fact, as illustrated in Figure 2, our study found that almost a third of the executives surveyed had considerable difficulty in identifying a single company that they perceived as having an authentic corporate purpose. Figure 2: Challenge in Identifying a Company with an Authentic Corporate Purpose To illustrate the difficulty in identifying a firm with an authentic corporate purpose, one respondent wrote: Absolutely no name comes to my mind in this context, not even Google, Amazon, BMW, Deutsche Bank, or any other. Furthermore, in those instances where a company could be identified as having an authentic corporate purpose, no one single company emerged as a clear leader. For example, as can be seen in Figure 3, only five companies received more than five mentions each. These were Google, Nestle, Apple, IKEA and Patagonia (refer also to Appendix VIII for a ranking of companies perceived as having an authentic corporate purpose). In addition, there was a very long tail in that a total of over 181 companies received at least one mention suggesting very diverse and unique individual perceptions of the authenticity of an organization’s corporate purpose (refer to Appendix IX for companies identified as having an authentic corporate purpose and receiving at least one mention). 15
Page 1 and 2: How Authentic is your Corporate Pur
Page 3 and 4: Contents Executive summary ........
Page 5 and 6: Executive summary Introduction Over
Page 7 and 8: although awareness is critical to a
Page 9 and 10: Research by Burson-Marsteller and I
Page 11 and 12: To validate the dimensional structu
Page 13: Leading Image: In contrast, researc
Page 17 and 18: Figure 4: Top Five Companies with a
Page 19 and 20: We then asked more specifically for
Page 21 and 22: 6. Leadership and Authentic Corpora
Page 23 and 24: 7. Qualitative Research Findings In
Page 25 and 26: One executive described the “doub
Page 27 and 28: companies as members. Other such fo
Page 29 and 30: - Is the organization aware of the
Page 31 and 32: 1) Seeking feedback from stakeholde
Page 33 and 34: knowledge for the broader good. Tha
Page 35 and 36: - Does the organization openly shar
Page 37 and 38: • Strategy has to illustrate purp
Page 39 and 40: making process. If managers are not
Page 41 and 42: De Hoogh, A. H., Den Hartog, D. N.,
Page 43 and 44: Leading 13. Appendices Appendix I:
Page 45 and 46: Appendix II: Qualitative Interview
Page 47 and 48: Appendix III: Qualitative Interview
Page 49 and 50: Appendix V: Characteristics of Surv
Page 51 and 52: Appendix VII: Industry Demographics
Page 53 and 54: Appendix IX: Companies Identified a
Page 55 and 56: Appendix XI: Ranking of Full List o
Page 57 and 58: Appendix XIII: Status of Authentic
Page 59 and 60: Appendix XV: Standardized item fact
Page 61: Appendix XVII: Confirmatory Factor

BM_IMD_REPORT-How-Authentic-is-your-Corporate-Purpose

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?