Around seventy percent of people rate purpose as “moderately important” or less - according to early data from Kanso.

That’s a strange result for a factor that comes up constantly in interviews, in exit surveys, in the language companies use to sell roles. If purpose mattered as much as people claim, you’d expect the numbers to be higher.

The gap between what people say about purpose and what they’d actually trade for it is the more interesting story.

What the research actually says

Teresa Amabile’s research on the progress principle found that daily progress on meaningful work is the single strongest driver of positive inner work life, stronger than recognition, stronger than incentives. That’s a real finding, and it’s easy to read it as proof that purpose alignment is what people need most.

But Amabile’s work is about progress, not purpose. People feel good making headway on something they understand and can see moving forward. That’s a different thing to caring about an organisation’s broader purpose statement. The two get conflated constantly, and the conflation is part of why purpose sounds more decisive in conversation than it turns out to be in practice.

Self-Determination Theory, developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, names autonomy, competence, and relatedness as the three core psychological needs. Purpose isn’t on that original list. The thing people reach for first when describing what they want from work isn’t actually one of the foundational needs the research identifies. It might explain why purpose behaves differently under pressure than autonomy or competence do; those are needs people protect instinctively, while purpose is closer to a value they hold and don’t always act on.

Why this varies between people

A development worker who took a pay cut to join an NGO has usually made a real trade for purpose. The purpose isn’t abstract to them; it’s the reason they joined the organisation in the first place.

Whereas a backend engineer at a logistics company might find the technical problems genuinely interesting and never once think about the company’s stated purpose. Neither person is wrong. They’ve just landed in different places on a factor that gets talked about as universal.

What it looks like when it’s missing, and when it’s right

When purpose is absent and the person needed it, the work feels hollow even when it’s well-paid and well-structured. Competence and autonomy aren’t enough to compensate; something is quietly missing every day, and it tends to surface as low-grade disengagement rather than an obvious complaint.

When purpose is present and genuinely valued, people tolerate friction elsewhere that would otherwise be a dealbreaker. Worse pay, slower progression, more bureaucracy, all of it becomes more bearable when the purpose is real to the person doing the work.

The cost nobody names upfront

Here’s the trade that rarely gets said out loud: purpose-driven organisations tend to be inflexible. The conviction that makes the purpose compelling is frequently the same conviction that makes the organisation resistant to changing how it operates. Question the approach and you’re not just questioning a process; you’re brushing up against something people have built an identity around.

So a strong purpose doesn’t arrive free. It tends to come bundled with rigidity, slower iteration, and a culture that treats dissent about strategy as something closer to disloyalty.

What this is actually asking you

This isn’t an argument that purpose doesn’t matter. It’s an observation that most people overstate it when asked directly and underweight it when actually forced to choose, and that gap is worth being honest about rather than smoothing over.

Find out where this sits in your hierarchy.

If your organisation’s purpose stopped feeling true tomorrow, would the work still hold up on its own?

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References & Notes

• Teresa Amabile, The Progress Principle, 2011 — found that daily progress on meaningful work is the strongest driver of positive inner work life, stronger than recognition or financial incentive.
• Edward Deci & Richard Ryan, Self-Determination Theory (origin 1985, widely replicated since) — identifies autonomy, competence, and relatedness as core psychological needs.