Conference Agenda

Corporate Purpose has gained substantial attention as a strategic lever for employee engagement and organizational resilience. Yet a critical question remains underexplored: how do employees actively contribute to shaping Corporate Purpose, and what role does motivation play in driving this contribution? This question carries particular urgency for logistics and supply chain organizations, where persistent workforce shortages, high turnover rates, and structurally fragmented workforces make employee identification with organizational values both a strategic imperative and a persistent challenge.

Existing research has predominantly treated Corporate Purpose as a top-down managerial declaration, examining its effects on employees rather than employees' active role in shaping it. Where co-creation has been studied, it has remained conceptually underdeveloped, with employee involvement treated as a monolithic construct without differentiation between its individual and collective dimensions. This paper addresses this gap by examining how employee motivation drives two distinct forms of Corporate Purpose co-creation and how these in turn contribute to Purpose Strength at the organizational level.

Drawing on a quantitative survey of 188 employees across industries and hierarchical levels, the study tests a structural model. Corporate Purpose Strength is operationalized through the Purpose Strength Index (PSI) by Lleo et al. (2021). The model differentiates between individual co-creation (employees' personal contributions to shaping Corporate Purpose) and collective co-creation (collaborative, cross-hierarchical processes through which Corporate Purpose is jointly developed and reinforced).

The findings reveal that motivation is the central driver of Purpose Strength, both directly and through two sequential co-creation pathways. Motivation first activates individual co-creation, which in turn strongly predicts collective co-creation - suggesting that individual engagement may function as a precondition for collective purpose-shaping to emerge. Both co-creation forms contribute independently to the Purpose Strength. Together, these results indicate a sequential logic: motivation activates individual co-creation, which enables collective co-creation, both of which reinforce Corporate Purpose Strength. For organizations seeking to strengthen Corporate Purpose, this implies that collective participation cannot be mandated top-down, rather it must be preceded by individual motivation and personal engagement.

For organizations with structurally diverse and geographically dispersed workforces, such as those in logistics and supply chain management, the sequential model offers actionable guidance, building individual motivation and engagement is the necessary first step before collective Purpose co-creation mechanisms can take effect.