Fostering meaningful work in organizations: A multi-level review and integration
Evgenia I. Lysova, Blake A. Allan, Bryan J. Dik, Ryan D. Duffy, Michael F. Steger
Vocational Behavior - February 2019
Abstract
With more individuals wanting their work to be meaningful, rather than just a source of income, more organizations recognize that fostering meaningful work is crucial for engaging their employees. Although scholars from diverse disciplines have made valuable efforts to examine how individual, job, organizational, and societal factors contribute to meaningful work, there is still no cohesive understanding of how these factors relate to one another and, thus, how organizations can proactively foster experiences of meaningful work for their employees. This paper reports the results of a multilevel review on the factors that contribute to workers' experiences of meaningful work and discusses how these factors are related to each other to enable the experience of meaningful work in ways that organizations can promote. Our review suggests that to enable individuals to move beyond satisfying their basic needs by constructing their own sense of meaningful work, organizations should build and maintain work environments characterized by a) well-designed, good-fitting, and quality jobs that provide opportunities to job craft, b) facilitative leaders, cultures, policies and practices, and high-quality relationships, and c) an access to decent work. Our review demonstrates that there is a need for scholars to develop a theory that explains how individual, organizational and societal factors interact to foster meaningful work in organizations. Future research should also explore how organizations can target personality and societal factors that contribute to meaningful work.
Section snippets
Meaningful work and related concepts
For the majority of working individuals, meaningfulness is the most significant and valuable feature of work (Cascio, 2003). But what does meaningful work mean? A key distinction is between “meaning” and “meaningfulness” (Pratt & Ashforth, 2003). “Meanings” are people's perceptions or interpretations of elements in their environment. Therefore, “meanings” are closely related to meaning-making – a cognitive process whereby people make sense of their experiences (Wrzesniewski, Dutton, & Debebe,...
Theoretical models of meaningful work
Scholars from diverse disciplines (e.g., management, organizational behavior, vocational psychology) have made theoretical contributions to understand factors that facilitate the experience of meaningful work. For example, Lips-Wiersma and Morris (2009) identified four sources of meaningful work – a) developing and becoming self, b) unity with others, c) serving others, and d) expressing the self – as well as from understanding and addressing the tensions between these dimensions. The authors...
Method
To find relevant articles for our review, we conducted an extensive search of the literature across multiple databases from a variety of fields (e.g., PsycINFO, Social Sciences Citations Index, Business Source Complete, etc.), although we focused on reviewing journal articles and academic book chapters representing management, organizational behavior, and vocational psychology disciplines. We also included articles from our knowledge of the literature and through ancestral searches...
Overview of the reviewed literature
Table 1 provides a summary of our review of the conceptual and empirical work on the antecedents of meaningful work at different levels...
Discussion and theoretical integration
Our review points to the fact that despite the important scholarly advancements in the understanding of antecedents of meaningful work, with few exceptions (e.g., Allan, Duffy, & Collisson, 2017; Ariely, Kamenica, & Prelec, 2008), the research on meaningful work has largely been cross-sectional. This makes it difficult to ascertain what causes meaningful work. The lack of experimental studies may be due, in part, to the lack of a comprehensive theory of meaningful work that can drive studies...
Conclusion
As the meaningful work literature grows and evolves, exploring linkages between individual-, job-, organizational-, and societal-level factors that foster meaningful work will become critical, if the goal is to build a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon. Yet these levels are clearly related to each other, adding complexity to our understanding of how meaningful work can be facilitated in an organizational context. By understanding how these diverse factors are related across levels...