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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

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Overview​

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.

Key ideas​

  • Meaningful work is more than enjoying a job. It is the sense that work matters, makes sense, and connects to something valuable.
  • The review integrates evidence across individual, job, organizational, and societal levels instead of treating meaning as only a personal attitude.
  • Job design matters: well-fitting, high-quality jobs and opportunities for job crafting can help people construct meaning in their work.
  • Organizational context matters too. Facilitative leaders, healthy cultures, supportive policies, and high-quality relationships all shape whether meaning can emerge.
  • Access to decent work is part of the model. Meaningful work is harder to sustain when basic work conditions are poor or insecure.
  • The authors argue that the field still needs stronger theory and more causal research to explain how these different levels interact.

Practical use​

  • Treat meaningful work as a system-level outcome, not just an individual attitude. Job design, leadership, culture, relationships, policy, and access to decent work all matter.
  • Give people room to shape their work where possible, especially through well-designed roles and opportunities for job crafting.
  • Build team environments with facilitative leaders, high-quality relationships, and practices that help people connect their work to contribution and purpose.

Original research: Open publisher page