Do all staff members need to share the same purpose?

The case of kaizen in a Japanese hospital

Abstract

It is said that when an organization embarks on a new activity, the entire organization needs to be on board with the organizational purpose of that activity. However, in the case of Hospital X, which implemented kaizen, even though the purposes of kaizen differed across workers, the usefulness of these new activities was communicated as being shared purposes (a) among workers in the same division where superiors and subordinates work closely together and (b) among workers performing the same jobs but in different divisions. Thus, the new activities were adopted by the entire organization without having a common organizational purpose.