Multiple goals and multiple aspirations: new questions, new perspectives

Baumann, Oliver, Newark, Daniel, Sump, Franziska, Audia, Pino g., Bettis, Richard a, Blettner, Daniela, Syrigos, Evangelos, Wahle, Thorsten, Gollisch, Simon, Kostopoulos, Konstantinos christos, Martignoni, Dirk and Meissner, Felix (2020) Multiple goals and multiple aspirations: new questions, new perspectives. Academy of Management Proceedings, 2020 (1), 12781. (doi:10.5465/AMBPP.2020.12781symposium).

Abstract

It is common to view organizations as instruments to pursue collective goals. But beyond recognizing the presence of organizational goals, important questions relate to how these goals come about and drive organizational behavior. These questions are particularly relevant because organizations are typically characterized by the presence of multiple, and often conflicting, goals. Starting with the seminal work on the Behavioral Theory of the Firm, various lines of research have studied how organizations form goals, set aspirations as reference points for evaluating goal attainment, and change behaviour and aspirations in response to performance feedback. Yet this work notwithstanding, many exciting questions remain for both theoretical and empirical research at various levels of analysis. For this symposium, we have assembled a set of (predominantly) younger scholars that are working on a variety of issues related to multiple goals and multiple aspirations, as well as two preeminent experts on the topic who will serve as discussants. The symposium pursues two broad objectives: One is to showcase and discuss four different projects that probe intriguing unresolved questions at different conceptual levels, relate to different discussions in the literature, and use different models and methodologies. The second objective is to stimulate a fruitful conversation about how future research can further improve our understanding of how organizations set and pursue multiple goals and aspirations.

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