What remainsFIGURE 1Striving for Purposefulness and MeaningfulnessStriving forpurposefulness(directedness andintentionality)Striving formeaningfulness(perceived significance)ExperiencedmeaningfulnessMotivationalprocesses*Self-efficacy*Action goals*ExpectationsWorkoutcomes*Satisfaction*Satisfactory-Taskperformance-Citizenship-Counterproductivebehaviors-WithdrawalPersonalitytraitclustersPurposefulgoalstrivingTask and socialjob characteristics134 Academy of Management Review Januaryunanswered is a better understanding of howand when these traits affect motivation.Our theory argues that the fundamental higher-order implicit goals associated with thesefive personality traits can be thought of as the“psychological mechanisms” that Funder (2001)suggests will guide and direct the unique patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior. Thesepsychological mechanisms or higher-ordergoals serve to organize the dispositional tendencies to think, feel, and act associated witheach personality trait in ways that differentiatethem from those associated with the other traits.Thus, striving to naturally express personalitytraits leads us to invest more personal resources—mental attention, emotional connections,and energetic activity—to fulfill particular typesof higher-order goals. For example, highly extraverted employees who are ambitious, dominant,and excitement seeking are predisposed tochoose a goal to fulfill their innate desire toobtain power and influence over others and tocreate competitive relationships. Such employees will experience greater motivation whenthey are able to pursue in unfettered ways thosegoals that guide behaviors linked to obtaininggreater status and getting ahead of others. Aswe discuss next, these implicit, higher-levelgoals are the key mechanisms by which thedistal dispositional determinants of motivatedbehavior lead to purposeful work striving.Higher-order implicit goals. A basic assumption in the theory of purposeful work behavior isthat employee behavior is purposeful or directed toward the attainment of goals (e.g., Barrick et al., 2002; Locke, 1976). Goals are hierarchically organized, based on their abstraction(Austin & Vancouver, 1996; Cropanzano, James,& Citera, 1993), with higher-level goals specifying the “why” or purpose of behavior and lowerlevel goals detailing the “how” or specific actionplans to attain the overarching goals. The higher-order goals are crucial in our theory becausethey represent fundamental, distal, desired motivational objectives that people strive to attain.People often focus attention on these broadhigher-order goals implicitly and may not evenbe consciously aware of them. This builds onrecent research, which clearly reveals that people are generally unaware of the higher-levelgoals that guide their behavior and, further, thatthe key is attention more than explicit awareness (DeShon & Gillespie, 2005; Dijksterhuis & Aarts, 2010). This counterintuitive distinction is
basic to our theory, since activation of attention
but not necessarily conscious awareness is all
that is required to act on these higher-order goals.
In our model these implicit higher-order goals
represent essential, enduring personal agendas
that reside at the top of the individual’s goal
hierarchy. Although the goals at higher levels
tend to be common across individuals, the importance or value attached to each goal differs
depending on the individual’s personality (DeShon & Gillespie, 2005). If not, a person would be
overwhelmed by conflicts between goals and
would be unable to act. This also explains the
fundamental role personality plays in predicting which purposeful implicit goal the individual actually seeks to attain or considers
beneficial.
Building on previous dominant typologies
that are common across different motivational
theories (Adler, 1939; Allport, 1955; Barrick,
Mitchell, & Stewart, 2003; Baumeister & Leary,
1995; Brunstein, Schultheiss, & Gräsmann, 1998;
DeShon & Gillespie, 2005; Emmons & McAdams,
1991; Hogan, 1983; Kehr, 2004; Maslow, 1943; McClelland, Koestner, & Weinberger, 1998; Murray,
1938; Steers & Braunstein, 1976), we identified
four fundamental goals. As shown in Table 1,
these higher-order implicit goals have different
names in different theories.
For example, Deci and Ryan’s (2000) selfdetermination theory suggests that individuals
are motivated to achieve three fundamental
goals: striving for competence, autonomy, and
relatedness. In addition to these three basic
goals, or perhaps by splitting relatedness into
two separate goals, other theoretical frameworks have shown that individuals are also inspired to engage in status-striving behavior,
such as seeking power (Barrick et al., 2002; McClelland, 1971; Trapnell & Wiggins, 1990), in addition to communion or relatedness. Building on
these theories, we posit that the four proposed
implicit goals comprehensively capture individual differences in intrinsic motivation that determines purposefulness and meaningfulness
at work.
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