Purpose at the Top: How CEOs and Senior Leaders Perceive, Enact, and Embed Organizational Purpose

ABSTRACT

Organizational purpose has gained increasing attention in academic and practitioner discourse, yet how senior leaders personally make sense of, articulate, and operationalize it in complex multi‐stakeholder environments remains underexplored. As the primary drivers of organizational direction and culture, Chief Executive Officers and senior leaders play a pivotal role in shaping and institutionalizing this orientation across their organizations. This study addresses the gap by examining how 29 senior leaders, predominantly CEOs, perceive and enact purpose as both a personal construct and a strategic and cultural force. Drawing on leadership‐as‐practice and sensemaking as primary theoretical lenses, and using a qualitative, interview‐based methodology, the study identifies four aggregate dimensions shaping how leaders understand and enact organizational purpose: Meaning, Origins, Activation, and Desired Impact. These dimensions form the foundation of a Purpose‐Driven Process encompassing Development, Communication, Implementation, and Measurement, illustrating how leaders move from internal clarity to collective enactment while navigating tensions between stakeholder demands and personal values. The study contributes a practice‐based, empirically grounded framework extending leadership‐as‐practice theory by specifying the micro‐practices through which purpose becomes embedded in organizational life and identifying ownership structure and leader tenure as significant contextual variables shaping how that process unfolds.