Microfoundations of organizational goals: a review and new directions for future research

Organizational goals are central in management theory, yet our understanding of their antecedents, formation and dynamics, and consequences contains many gaps, in particular concerning the microfoundations of how goals are formed and changed and through which they may affect individual and organizational performance. We distill a number of key themes in the extant literature, use the microfoundations perspective to isolate research gaps, and suggest a microfoundational framework for future research on organizational goals. We discuss the theories that are particularly promising with respect to furthering such research on organizational goals.