Meaning-based leadership

Abstract

The core role of leadership in organizations is to motivate the pursuit of the organization’s purpose (i.e., the reason the organization exists and does what it does). Yet, there currently is no leadership theory that revolves around this notion of purpose pursuit. Addressing this issue, I propose the concept of meaning-based leadership, defined as leader advocacy of an understanding of organizational purpose and why this purpose is meaningful in an appeal to motivate members to contribute to the pursuit of that purpose. I advance a model of the core process through which meaning-based leadership motivates purpose pursuit and the contingencies of this process. I identify key implications for the empirical study of this model as well as directions for the further conceptual and empirical development of important implications of the model.