A hierarchical taxonomy of top managers' goals

To embed goal theories more deeply in the domain of top-level leadership behavior and to provide a vehicle to facilitate future research, the authors developed a taxonomy of managerial goals. Interviews with 75 company leaders - founders and presidents - from 3 countries generated 2,182 articulated goals. Content analysis supported 2 taxonomic dimensions: goal content and hierarchical level. The goal content dimension specified 10 categories of substantive goal targets, and the second dimension captured the hierarchical structure of the top leaders' goal sets, with lower-level goals being instrumental toward achieving superordinate goals. The hierarchy comprised 5 goal levels: ultimate, enterprise, strategic, project, and process. Chi-square analyses revealed relationships between goal content and hierarchical level as well as differences between the national subsamples.