(Illustration by Adam McCauley) 

Executives and managers often think they can motivate their employees by communicating their organization’s highest aspirations in an attempt to infuse their day-to-day work with meaning. But recent research findings are equivocal on this point, with some such efforts leaving employees more dispirited. The ambivalence may be explained by the disconnect between aspirations and humdrum tasks. The question is whether leaders can bridge this gap.

A recent paper by Andrew Carton, a professor of management at Wharton, examines President John F. Kennedy’s ambitious goal to put a man on the moon within a decade and the steps NASA took to communicate this aspiration to agency employees in a way that inspired their collective work toward historic success. Records suggest widespread feeling among NASA employees during the 1960s that they were working toward the same lofty goal of helping the United States to reach the moon, no matter their individual job.

“I wanted to look at people’s ability or inability to see a connection between their work and the overriding purpose of the organization they work for,” Carton says. The quote from a NASA janitor in the title of his paper—“I’m Not Mopping the Floors, I’m Putting a Man on the Moon”—is apocryphal. But when Carton went back to primary sources, he found multiple quotes from workers at the space agency during the moon missions that expressed similar sentiments. In the time before Neil Armstrong’s 1969 moonwalk, NASA employees said they felt “they were putting people on the moon even if they were secretaries,” he says.

The study offers “an inductive analysis of how Kennedy and leaders of NASA in the 1960s communicated to employees about NASA’s ultimate aspirations,” Carton writes. He used primary sources, including NASA’s archive of documents, as well as documentary footage, interview transcripts, and books quoting NASA employees.

Carton found that Kennedy and NASA leaders implemented four stages of “sensegiving” as they focused employees’ attention on a common organizational purpose. They started by reducing NASA’s ultimate aspirations down to one single goal and gradually homed in on a concrete and quantifiable objective: landing a man on the moon and bringing him back safely.

These actions translated into five levels of employee engagement and connection-
building between day-to-day tasks and the organization’s aspiration. Employees were led to understand that there were specific steps to take for NASA to achieve its ultimate goal, and how they would each play a part. This resulted, finally, in workers feeling as though their own daily work contributed to the organization’s mission of putting a man on the moon.

“Leaders thus act as architects by setting a highly particularized enabling condition (constricting attention to a single end-point), and employees act as builders who do the heavy lifting by constructing a complex lattice-work of connections between their own work, the work of other employees, and the organization’s goals, ultimately gaining a sense of their unique personal contribution to the organization,” Carton writes.

A new finding in this paper, Carton says, is that leaders should assume that employees won’t make a connection between their daily work and the organization’s overarching purpose on their own. It’s a leader’s job to do this. Carton envisions such an ideal leader as an “architect”—instead of a “transformational visionary” or “overseer”—who draws a blueprint of organizational aspiration that articulates how each employee’s work builds the ultimate product so concretely that employees can see the plan and their place in it, and become inspired.

Carton’s study “advances our thinking about the leader role in organized activity and also yields very practical advice for emerging leaders,” says the University of Michigan’s Susan Ashford, who calls it one of her favorite papers this year.

“I think that a key theme in the article is that it’s not enough to have a very big picture vision, you have to also make it vivid enough that people can feel like it’s concrete and something that they can achieve,” says Batia Wiesenfeld, Andre J.L. Koo Professor of Management at New York University Stern School of Business.

The paper offers guidance to executives at companies that don’t have an obvious NASA-style mission but instead make money from more pedestrian or commercial activities. Those leaders also have to find a way to motivate employees, even if they are making paintbrushes rather than putting a man on the moon. And if they set out a lofty aspiration, they also need to communicate to employees the stepping-stones that connect their work to that vision.

“The lesson for those people is you need that big ambitious goal that unites all the specifics,” Wiesenfeld says.

Read more stories by Chana R. Schoenberger.