2023.12.05

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Meaningful and Meaningless Work

Workplace well-being has many determinants, one being meaningful work.

Meaningful work has intrinsic value to the person doing it and also extrinsic value to the organization in terms of outcomes like turnover and productivity.

Quite a bit of research focuses on job attributes (e.g., task variety, significance) as a way to assess and draw conclusions about whether someone’s work is meaningful or meaningless.

Less research has been done where people are asked directly about their feelings about work.

A study by Martikainen, Kudrna, & Dolan (2022) offers a qualitative inquiry into how people describe their work when it is meaningful and meaningless.

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Importance

This research is important for leaders to know about because:

1. it yields improved knowledge about what constitutes meaningful work, which is one antecedent for workplace well-being;
2. leaders can keep their finger on the pulse of their staff’s underlying sentiment by paying attention to the language they are using to describe their work.

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Terminology: Affective Eudaimonia

The term the researchers gave to the subjective sense of meaning that individuals derive from their work is affective eudaimonia. It is a facet of psychological meaningfulness overall.

Eudaimonia essentially means fulfillment on a deep level. It is often used to mean well-being in the sense of a life well-lived. (read a post about how it can be measured in general)

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Findings: Main Themes

The researchers originally sorted the responses into five main themes: impact and influence (contribution), other people (connection), self (conversion), lack of agency, and waste of time. The last two themes were then combined into a single one called confinement, leaving four themes in total.

• The theme of connection was only found in descriptions of meaningful moments.
• The themes of contribution and conversion included both meaningful and meaningless moments.
• The theme of confinement was only found in descriptions of meaningless moments.

Connection Theme

Meaningful language focused on sharing, forming, and deepening relationships at work.

Conversion Theme

Meaningful responses focused on individual accomplishment, personal change, and self-growth at work. Meaningless responses focused on the lack of achievement or self-development.

Contribution Theme

Meaningful responses focused on doing something for others, having a social impact, and contributing with professional skills and knowledge. Meaningless responses centered on lacking the ability to create value for others.

Confinement Theme

Meaningless responses included feeling restricted, lacking agency or autonomy, a sense of waste of time or effort, experiencing working for an ulterior motive, under outside control, as a mismatch between one´s tasks and the goal of the work, or not being able to participate in decision-making. “Waste of time” was the most common phrase used to describe meaninglessness at work.

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Findings: Meaninglessness Hits Harder

The study reports that people described meaningless moments more descriptively and vividly. On average, participants used substantially more adjectives when describing meaningless work. The most common meaningless adjectives were bored, frustrated, tired, useless, and repetitive.

Happy, grateful, and content were the most frequently used adjectives for describing meaningful work.

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Research Citation: Martikainen, S. J., Kudrna, L., & Dolan, P. (2022). Moments of meaningfulness and meaninglessness: A qualitative inquiry into affective eudaimonia at work. Group & Organization Management, 47(6), 1135-1180.

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