Ability of leaders to effectively communicate and influence employees' commitment to organizational goals

A significant function of business leaders is being able to define organizational goals and effectively communicate goals to employees in ways that employees understand the goals, their roles in achieving them, and commit to the goals. While many organizations experience difficulties traceable to employees not understanding organizational goals, their roles within the organization, or what they stand to gain from staying employed, there are leaders who effectively communicate organizational goals to employees and obtain employees' commitment to organizational goals. This qualitative case study was conducted to explore the experiences of 20 past and current executives and senior leaders of mid-size and large organizations in Arizona and California, who were known to be effective at communicating goals to employees and at persuading individual employees to align with the goals. Participants were interviewed to identify their actions, and data was analyzed using content analysis of transcribed interview responses. Results establish these leaders' effective communication of goals started at the staff recruitment stage and included certain factors: trust when leaders interacted with employees in humane ways, were good orators, communicated clearly, gave job descriptions, and were credible. Results also demonstrated leaders used informal interaction methods in communicating goals to employees and scheduled meetings with employees to allow employees to seek goal clarification. Certain study conclusions agreed with published literature: goal discussions were simple, frequent, tied to an employee's role, and had value to an employee. Other conclusions were unusual with regard to literature: leaders emphasized hiring the kind of employee who understands and commits to goals, who already demonstrated goal alignment; leaders said they promptly discharged persons who did not master organizational goals; and leaders indicated their own ethical behavior was not critical to obtaining goal commitment and alignment. Recommendations to leaders include surveying entire organization to evaluate how the organization stands, reassessing own knowledge of organizational goals, and employing leadership coaches and experts to train leaders not doing well. Recommendations for future research include using same research questions to obtain employees' perspectives, conducting separate researches that will part and reverse each of the two research questions, but done from employees perspectives.