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The Concept of Organizational Goal*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Lawrence B. Mohr
Lawrence B. Mohr*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
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Abstract

The organizational goal concept is important for significant types of organizational research but its utility has been downgraded in recent scholarship. This paper reviews critically key contributions to conceptualizing the organizational goal and synthesizes many of their elements into a more concrete and comprehensive conceptualization. The efforts of Etzioni, Seashore and Yuchtman, Simon, and Thompson to bypass the need for a goal concept in evaluative and other behavioral research are unconvincing in important respects. However, they are persuasive in underscoring the importance of viewing organizational goals as multiple and as empirically determined. Perrow, Gross, and others convincingly suggest a dual conceptualization, so that goals are dichotomized into those with external referents (transitive goals) and those with internal referents (reflexive goals). Deniston et al. contribute the desirability of subsetting the goals of organizations into “program goals” and of differentiating goals from both subgoals and activities. The existence and relative importance of organizational goals and an allied concept, “operative goals,” may be operationally determined by current social science methods. The goal concept as presented here has implications for the evaluation of organizational effectiveness, for research on organizational behavior, for organization theory, and for views of the role of organizations in society.

Type
Articles
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 67 , Issue 2 , June 1973 , pp. 470 - 481
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1973

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Footnotes

*

The many colleagues and students who commented helpfully on earlier versions of this paper are far too numerous to mention individually, but I should like to acknowledge my collective debt to them all. Work on this paper was begun while I was a Research Associate at the School of Public Health, with support from the Public Health Service grant no. CHS 00044, and continued during my present affiliation with the Institute of Public Policy Studies, both at The University of Michigan.

References

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