Enlightening the future with wisdom from the past Revisiting the intrinsic alignment between personal motives, organizational purpose and societal development

ROCHA HECTOR

Edimburgo

Conferencia; Egos Colloquium; 2019

How can personal motives, organizational purpose, and societal development bealigned in a sustainable way? This question is at the heart of a the interface between theindividual, organizational and social levels of analysis and has been triggered by new areas ofinquiry to rethink governance (Tihany, Graffin, and George, 2014), the purpose of businessorganizations (Hollensbe et al, 2014, Donaldson and Walsh, 2015), and societal grandchallenges (Ferraro, Etzion, and Gheman, 2015) in management research. For example, as togovernance, research is required to identify the ?legitimacy of stakeholders interests in contextswhere disagreements or ambiguity arise? and to consider ?organizational purpose and theinterests of different stakeholders beyond the preferences of firm investors? (Tihany, Graffin,and George, 2014:1539). In the same vein, as to purpose of organizations, scholars call formore research in areas that ?link purpose (of organizations) to larger values that promote thewell-being of society and individuals within and outside of business? (Hollensbe et al,2014:1228). Finally, grand challenges ?are formulations of global problems that can beplausibly addressed through coordinated and collaborative effort? (George et al. 2016:1880)through ?multilevel action? (1892).This question has been addressed by not only philosophers and political scientists formany centuries but also management scholars and practitioners in more recent years. Scholarshave researched the phenomena of motives and alignments through the lenses of socialpsychology (cf. Fiske, 1992, Moore, 2005), behavioral economics (Frey, 1997, Sen, 1990),management studies (Walsh, Weber and Margolis, 2003; Porter and Kramer, 2011; Hollensbeet al. 2014) and business ethics (Moore, 2005, Waters and Bird, 1989).However, the dominant management theories assume a permanent trade-off of motivesbetween these three levels and an instrumental rationality approach to study them. For example, 2theories such as Transaction Cost Economics (Williamson 1975), Agency Theory (Jensen andMeckling 1994), Resource-based View (Barney 1991) and Industrial Organization Economics(Porter 1985) are based on the assumption that people are self-interested and there is apermanent conflict between purposes at different levels of analysis (Ghoshal 2005; Donaldson,2012). These restrictive assumptions prevent advances in management theory building becausemutually exclusive categories cannot be integrated ontologically, theoretically and empiricallybeyond trade-off interactions (cf. Poole and Van de Ven, 1989).This paper proposes a model for a sustainable alignment between personal interests,organizational purpose and societal development, replacing the dominant assumptions of selfinterest and instrumental rationality for the concepts of self-love and practical rationality toresolve the current tensions between levels of analysis. The argument is that, in order toresearch alternative alignment mechanisms, it is necessary to investigate a broader set ofphilosophical principles on human motives, organizational purpose, social development andtheir relationships.To this aim, this paper uses philosophical and theoretical principles. As fromphilosophy, Aristotle states that two contraries can be integrated because they belong to thesame category (Aristotle, 1984a). As for theory building, Poole and Van de Ven propose asynthesis method by introducing new terms to resolve paradoxes (Poole and Van de Ven,1989).This paper first describes the Trade-Off and Instrumental Alignment models, which arebased on the self-interest and instrumental rationality assumptions and, then, it develops theIntrinsic Alignment model based on the self-love and practical rationality assumptions. Figure3 summarizes the key features of the three models.