Campus Location
Dallas Campus (Online)
Date of Award
8-2025
Document Type
Dissertation
Department
Organizational Leadership
Degree Name
Doctor of Education
Committee Chair or Primary Advisor
Jillian Skelton
Second Committee Member or Secondary Advisor
BJ McMichael
Third Committee Member or Committee Reader
Faith Ngunjiri
Abstract
Since the early 2000s, research has increased on purpose and how it correlates with fulfillment outcomes in life and career satisfaction. This research has been valuable in professional and academic fields and helped develop leadership practices and interventions for organizations to increase satisfaction levels among employees and students. This study focused on the general problem that research dedicated to purpose has not adequately addressed whether origin of purpose affect its outcomes on fulfillment levels, particularly those of life and career satisfaction. To address this consideration, the researcher conducted a quantitative associative correlation to measure if and to what extent origin of purpose correlates with life and career fulfillment outcomes for early career professionals with work experience within the age range of 20–28. Convenient sampling and snowball sampling techniques were utilized, targeting large employers and higher education institutions to obtain a sample of 119 individuals from a midsized West Texas city for review. Since the data included outliers, Pearson’s correlations would not have been appropriate, so the researcher ran Spearman’s Rank-Order tests for each of the research questions. These tests resulted in a weak to moderate positive correlation between every variable pairing, producing statistically significant results for most pairings. From these results as well as additional correlations ran from demographic data provided by participants, there is evidence that origin of purpose may affect outcomes of career and life satisfaction and, therefore, should be considered in future research as it may also affect leadership practices in higher education and professional settings.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Hocking, Anne, "Origin of Purpose, Career Satisfaction, and Life Satisfaction: A Quantitative Study on Early Career Professionals" (2025). Digital Commons @ ACU, Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 933.
https://digitalcommons.acu.edu/etd/933