Literature Review on Goal Congruence

Introduction

Goal congruence induces consistency in the individual and organizational goals and firms often-achieving high congruence levels have an increasing coordination among the business and employee goals. Usually, the managers need to pursue agreement of individual objectives with those of the company to ascertain the critical organizational control necessary for multi-level goal creation and persuasion in a company. As such, the literature review seeks to explore the current understanding of goal congruence, and the associated interaction between the informal relationships within a companyâ€™s units, subunits, employees, and top managers. Often, achieving congruence requires firmâ€™s top management to leverage available points of contact to harness individual goals in line with the company objectives. Informal relationships play a crucial role in the process of creating congruence significantly influencing the organizational factors promoting or preventing the achievement of congruence. Unlike formal contracts informal relationships often ban on an organizationâ€™s openness and trust enabling a high-level reliance and cooperation among the firm units and subunits creating the necessary alignment between individual and organizational objectives.

Achieving Goal Congruence

Goal congruence in organizations involves the agreement by group members to pursue certain common objectives. Kennedy and Widener (2019), examines the attributes of formal linkages to examine how organizations achieve congruence. The researchers deduce that congruence involves two steps with members understanding the significance of goals and objectives, while the second step involves implementing actions to pursue the crucial goals (Kennedy & Widener, 2019, p. 33). Determining the process of achieving congruence involves first examining the employee perception regarding socialization analyzing how top management communicates critical information such as core values. Further, the researchers examine how the suopervisors promote career development and employees inclusion in peer mentoring. A second approach towards achieving congruence then dwells with determining how relationships work. Results indicate that relationships within the company promote communication and thereby reduce employee uncertainty, in the process enhancing their perception of career security. Job security promotes the staff attachment to the firm and consequently encourages the alignment of goals and objectives. Notably, although the researchers fail to establish a direct association between organizationâ€™s socialization mechanisms ad congruence, the indirect connection in perception between career security and harmonized organizational goals remains apparent in non-union staff members. The significance of social mechanisms of motivating congruence within an organization remains highly relevant in the context of informal relationships.

Zhang et al. (2018), on the other hand conducts a study to examine the existent disconnect between employee and organizational level high-performance work systems (HPWS). Utilizing a sample of 397 employees, 84 line managers, and 21 human resource executives, the researchers examined whether goal congruence by line managers alleviated the deficiencies between the employees and organizations in a HPWS.

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