Purpose idealism versus pragmatism: the impact of growth on purpose-driven businesses and their founders

Abstract

The aim of this research is to investigate the impact of growth on purpose-driven businesses and their founders. The exploratory nature of this work required an inductive, qualitative research. The results show that the impact of growth is multifaceted. Individual purpose was found to influence firm purpose during growth. Moreover, growth does not affect the core purpose, but the scope of the purpose adjusts during growth. Finally, purpose-driven founders were shown to need a stronger focus on work-life balance to achieve sustainable purpose. This underlines the importance of further research into the manifold impacts of grow the merged in this paper.