Is team commitment related to dialogue about corporate purpose?

This paper examines the relationship between communication regarding a firm's purpose between a team leader and individual team members (referred to as “purpose dialogue”) and the resulting levels of team commitment. We hypothesize that increased dialogue about purpose will lead to higher team commitment by enhancing consensus on the team's tasks and objectives. We also expect that this relationship will be negatively moderated by the variation in leader-member exchange quality (that undermines this consensus) and positively by autonomy given by leaders to individual team members (which reinforces it.) Using data from 469 firms and 57,440 individual observations, we find support for our hypotheses across different specifications. This paper contributes to research on corporate purpose at the team level, leader-member exchange theory, and management practice.