Outcomes of Meaningful Work: A Meta‐Analysis

Using job characteristics theory as a framework, we calculated meta‐analytic effect sizes between meaningful work and various outcomes and tested a mediated model of meaningful work predicting proximal and distal outcomes with meta‐analytic structural equation modelling (MASEM). From 44 articles (N = 23,144), we found that meaningful work had large correlations (r = 0.70+) with work engagement, commitment, and job satisfaction; moderate to large correlations (r = 0.44 to ?0.49) with life satisfaction, life meaning, general health, and withdrawal intentions; and small to moderate correlations (r = ?0.19 to 0.33) with organizational citizenship behaviours, self‐rated job performance, and negative affect. The best MASEM fitting model was meaningful work predicting work engagement, commitment, and job satisfaction and these variables subsequently predicting self‐rated performance, organizational citizenship behaviours, and withdrawal intentions. This meta‐analysis provides estimated effect sizes between meaningful work and its outcomes and reveals how meaningful work relates directly and indirectly to key outcomes.     

The Sociomaterial Negotiation of Social Entrepreneurs’ Meaningful Work

This research examines the role of digital technology in the constitution of meaningful work. Adopting a sociomaterial perspective, we argue that meaningful work emerges as an outcome of a complex negotiation between individuals and their digital devices. This process was explored through video diaries and interviews with social entrepreneurs, capturing moments of their everyday meaning‐making and encouraging reflexivity. Accounting for their sociomaterial practice led participants to reaffirm their work as uniquely meaningful, produce more nuanced accounts of meaningfulness and/or make pragmatic adjustments to their meaning making. Whilst authenticity was a key meta‐narrative in these accounts, it also produced tensional knots which, in their unravelling, required the adoption of more practicable meanings of work. The paper concludes by urging scholars to de‐centre the human from their analysis to provide a more complete account of meaningful work.     

The Dark Side of Deeply Meaningful Work: Work‐Relationship Turmoil and the Moderating Role of Occupational Value Homophily

How are close personal relationships experienced by people in deeply meaningful work? Drawing upon in‐depth interview data with 82 international aid workers, I offer three distinct contributions. First, I find that people who experience their work as deeply meaningful have high work devotion. I identify boundary inhibition as a mechanism to explain why they participate more willingly in overwork and erratic work, despite giving rise to time‐ and trust‐based conflict in their relationships. Second, I find that people with high work devotion often also experience emotional distance in their personal relationships when their close others don’t value their work – a context I call occupational value heterophily. This disconnection‐based conflict compounds the time‐ and trust‐based conflict and engenders an emotionally agonizing situation, which I call work‐relationship turmoil. Third, when close others do value their partner’s work – a context I call occupational value homophily – it fosters an emotional connection and offers an avenue for work‐relationship enrichment. These findings draw upon deeply meaningful work to detail the multi‐faceted work‐relationship experience among those with high work devotion.     

The Experience of Untapped Potential: Towards a Subjective Temporal Understanding of Work Meaningfulness

In this paper, we propose that untapped potential acts as a subjective temporal meaning‐making mechanism. Using a two‐wave survey design, we examine the relationship between job characteristics, untapped potential, and work meaningfulness in a heterogeneous sample of 542 employees. We found that employees’ perceived amount of untapped potential mediates the effects of skill variety, autonomy, and job feedback on work meaningfulness. This mediated relationship was moderated by the valence employees attributed to their untapped potential. Moreover, decreases in the perceived amount of untapped potential over time were related to increases in perceived work meaningfulness. Our research shows that work that allows employees to move beyond the here‐and‐now by providing opportunities to realize future work selves is experienced as particularly meaningful. We conclude that, if we wish to understand what makes work meaningful for employees in the present, we need to know how it aligns with their self‐perceptions in the future.     

Struggling with Meaningfulness when Context Shifts: Volunteer Work in a German Refugee Shelter

This article draws on an ethnographic study of volunteer work in a German refugee shelter to explore how individual experiences of meaningfulness are intertwined with shifting discursive and organisational contexts. At the beginning of the so‐called refugee crisis, societal discourses portrayed this volunteer work as extraordinarily meaningful – a state we capture through the metaphor of ‘overflow’. This ‘overflow’ mobilised volunteers and was an important point of reference for framing their work experiences as meaningful. Later, shifting discursive and organisational contexts challenged their framings. Instead of letting go, however, the ‘overflow’ triggered volunteers to reframe their experience in dysfunctional ways in order to sustain their sense of meaningfulness. This paper reveals how shifting societal discourses feed into individual experiences of meaningfulness, shows how individuals may respond to such shifts in problematic ways and theorises the nature of such shifts in drawing on Swidler’s notion of settling contexts.     

Datification and the Pursuit of Meaningfulness in Work

Proliferation of digital means of tracking worker activities has contributed to the rise of data‐driven approaches to managing people, with employees often required to record their activities for accountability purposes. Increased requirement for such datification work occurs at a juncture where meaningfulness is one of the most sought‐after work features. Datification work could both facilitate and hinder the pursuit of meaningfulness, yet literature provides little guidance into the nature of the connection and how it transpires. Our inductive study of academic professionals using an accountability system suggests that datification work characteristics link to meaningful work experiences in complex ways. We advance current theory on work meaningfulness by theorizing the role of a new work condition – datification – in meaningfulness experiences of professionals, outlining how system design and the institutional context become important elements influencing meaningful work experiences, and explaining how meaningfulness experiences are constructed through system appropriations.     

The Relationship Between Employee Fit Perceptions,Job Performance,and Retention: Implications of Perceived Fit

Meaningful work has become an increasingly important job outcome for individuals in recent years. Studies indicate that many employees lack experienced meaningfulness in their work and that organizations have not done a good job at creating meaningful and emotionally satisfying work experiences for employees. A person–job fit approach to meaningful work and employee retention is described that consists of matching individual self-concept with job tasks and behaviors. It is proposed that this self-concept–job fit will be strongly related to meaningful work. It is also proposed that meaningful work is related to important outcome variables valued by organizations, such as increased worker performance and employee retention. Path analysis supports the proposed relationships. Implications for human resource management activities and future research are discussed.     

Serving Time: Volunteer Work,Liminality and the Uses of Meaningfulness at Music Festivals

Drawing from a participant‐observer study of volunteering in the context of UK music festivals, we examine how the sense of meaningfulness and community relate to instrumental goals of consumption and efficiency. We argue that the liminal nature of the festival setting supports an ambivalence in which meaningfulness is established through constructions of community, while the commodification of community feelings leads to heterogeneous understandings of the work setting. Our findings reveal heterogeneous ways in which work was rendered meaningful by festival volunteers, ranging from (1) A commodity frame, characterizing work as drudgery seeking ‘fun’ through consumption (2) A ‘communitas’ frame, emphasizing a transcendental sense of collective immediacy and (3) A cynical frame, where communitas discourse is used instrumentally by both managers and workers. We discuss meaningful work as caught between creative community and ideological mystification, and how alternative workspaces vacillate between emancipatory principles of solidarity and neo‐normative forms of ideological control.     

加强思想政治工作,促进企业文化建设和企业和谐

在社会经济发展的今天,传统的思想政治工作的方法和模式已经不能适应新形势、新发展的需要,作为企业思想政治工作者应想办法寻找符合新形势下的教育思路,这对促进企业文化建设和企业和谐都具有重要意义。     

加强思想政治工作,促进企业文化建设和企业和谐

在社会经济发展的今天,传统的思想政治工作的方法和模式已经不能适应新形势、新发展的需要,作为企业思想政治工作者应想办法寻找符合新形势下的教育思路,这对促进企业文化建设和企业和谐都具有重要意义。     

“We’re not scum,we’re human”: Agential responses in the face of meaningless work

In this article, we address a gap in the meaningful work literature by exploring the processes by which work is experienced as meaningless. We adopt the lens of relational sociology and, through interviews with 45 participants in four very different occupations, we found that meaninglessness arises through four relational processes: powerlessness, disconnection, devaluation and self-doubt. Individuals enacted six agential responses to this experience. Two of these, resisting and responsibility-taking, were “reinstatement” strategies and four, acceptance, distancing, minimising and resistance, were “coping” strategies. In addition, some informants used “switching” as a framing device. These responses were not equally available to all workers in all occupations, suggestive of a stratified experience of work meaninglessness. Our study contributes to understandings of how work is rendered meaningless and how individuals might respond.     

工作满意度、组织承诺与离职倾向间关系问题的研究进展

文章对工作满意度、组织承诺与离职倾向的国内外研究的历史沿革、研究成果进行了概括和总结,并进行了深入评述。研究结果对于企业的人力资源管理具有一定的启发意义,并且对后续研究有一定的指导意义。     

Future business and the role of purchasing and supply management: Opportunities for ‘business-not-as-usual’ PSM research

The raison d'être for this article is simple: traditional ways of researching, theorizing, and practicing purchasing and supply management (PSM) are no longer sufficient to ‘meet the moment’. Scholars need to advance a “business-not-as-usual” footing approach to their work, if they are to make a meaningful contribution to addressing the current and future emergencies, as highlighted by recent extreme weather and the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, what can this, or should this, mean for a field rooted in traditional business thinking? This article builds on the Journal of Purchasing and Supply Management's (JPSM) 25th Anniversary Special Issue editorial (2019); members of the JPSM's editorial team advance their unique perspectives on what “business-not-as-usual” means for PSM. Specifically, we advocate both thinking much more widely, in scope and ambition, than we currently do, and simultaneously building our ability to comprehend supply chains in a more nuanced and granular way. We explore whether the bias toward positivist work has omitted potentially interesting findings, and viewpoints. This leads to a call to re-think how we approach our work: should the key criteria always be to focus on theory development or testing? Should academics “think bigger”? Turning to specific research themes, illustrations of how our current thinking can be challenged or broadened by addressing the circular economy, and role of purchasing and innovation. Specifically, the focus on the PSM function as an intrapreneur within the larger organization, and the role of innovation and technology in PSM work. Taken together, we hope the ideas and arguments presented here will inform and inspire ambitious and novel approaches to PSM research with significant and enduring impact on the transformation of business.     

Agile office work as embodied spatial practice: A spatial perspective on ‘open’ New Work environments

An increasing number of companies transform their traditional office spaces into open work environments, often as part of an effort for working relations to evolve away from rigid and hierarchical structures. Contrary to intentions, recent studies show how open office projects tend to re-produce social hierarchy and norms but say only little about how these socio-spatial structures come into being. In this study, we demonstrate how a workspace designed as ‘open’ is being (re-)produced and negotiated in everyday spatial practices. We investigate this question in an ethnographic research design using the example of office redesign at a German financial service company and from the perspective of social theories of space. First, we develop a critical perspective on the ‘new office’ by demonstrating that office work redesign is a political process. Through a focus on spatial practices of office work, we disclose movement and sound as crucial dimensions in the socio-political construction of ‘agile’ office work and of a social hierarchy in the open office. Second, based on our findings we propose that openness in organizational space, rather than being a design feature of a specific work environment, needs to be understood as a generative social process.     

A Cognitive Perspective on Entrepreneurship and the Firm

abstract    I propose to examine the theme of this Special Issue from the perspective of its treatment – and, of especial significance, its lack of treatment – within economics. In the course of this examination we shall observe that the concepts of entrepreneurship and the firm are generally kept separate, and attempt to explain why. I shall avoid any discussion of recent work, which is more productively left to my fellow contributors, choosing instead to devote the first half of my contribution to providing an analytical basis for the second half by exploring the problem of knowledge in economic systems, and relating this problem to the evolved nature of human beings and their relationship with their environment. In this exploration I shall rely almost entirely on the work of economists, though much of it was not directed to conventional economic issues.     

Introduction: globalizing international human resource management

In this Introduction, we have sought to explain the rationales in putting together a ‘Special Issue’ on Globalizing International Human Resource Management (IHRM). These include, first, coverage of as wide a range of regional and national cultures as possible; second, presentation of as wide a set as perspectives as possible; and last, discussion of how these may shape both theory and practice in the field.     

室外电工巡岗作业监控装置的研究

文章提出一种基于GPS的室外电工巡岗作业监控系统来解决铁路水电部门保证巡道作业质量的一种新思路,并对系统手持机的设计要求作了较充分的介绍,对上位机的软件应具备的功能作了阐述。现场实验数据表明,该系统的技术路线可行,有利于加强室外电工巡岗作业的质量监控和责任追究。     

Guest Editors' Introduction

abstract   This introductory paper provides a background to the origins, themes and papers of this Special Issue on Micro Strategy and Strategizing. Our overarching argument is that, while the field of strategy has traditionally concentrated on the macro-level of organizations, it needs now to attend to much more micro-level phenomena. We propose an activity-based view of strategy that focuses on the detailed processes and practices which constitute the day-to-day activities of organizational life and which relate to strategic outcomes. The paper develops this view by considering two bodies of theory, those of the resource based view and institutionalism; two bodies of empirical work, those on corporate diversification and structure; and finally the process tradition of strategy research. The paper identifies the benefits of the activity-based view and introduces some challenges for further research. It concludes by introducing the papers in this Special Issue.     

高校中的学院机关工作态度和工作效能评价方法的探讨

高校要加强和改进学院机关作风建设、提高机关整体工作水平,展现良好的精神风貌,必须科学合理的评价学院机关工作态度和工作效能,本文探讨一种评价方法以及这种方法对人事部门制定相应监督机制的指导作用。