Corporate Purpose and Financial Performance

We construct a measure of corporate purpose within a sample of U.S. companies based on approximately 500,000 survey responses of worker perceptions about their employers. We find that this measure of purpose is not related to financial performance. However, high-purpose firms come in two forms: firms characterized by high camaraderie between workers and firms characterized by high clarity from management. We document that firms exhibiting both high purpose and clarity have systematically higher future accounting and stock market performance, even after controlling for current performance, and that this relation is driven by the perceptions of middle management and professional staff rather than senior executives or hourly or commissioned workers. Taken together, these results suggest that firms with midlevel employees with strong beliefs in the purpose of their organization and the clarity in the path toward that purpose experience better performance.

The online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2018.1230.