What Makes Work Meaningful – or Meaningless

MIT Sloan Management Review, 2016

5 min read

4 take-aways

Audio & text

What's inside?

Employees value meaningfulness at work more than almost anything else.

auto-generated audio

1×

auto-generated audio

Editorial Rating

Qualities

Applicable
Eye Opening
Concrete Examples

Recommendation

Most people want to feel their work has meaning, and they perform better when they do. But can managers enhance employees’ sense of meaningfulness? Catherine Bailey of the University of Sussex and Adrian Madden of the University of Greenwich studied what creates – and destroys – a sense of meaningfulness at work. In a fascinating report published in the MIT Sloan Management Review, the authors suggest actions managers can take to foster meaningfulness – and the demoralizing missteps they should avoid.

Summary

People find meaning in their work in profoundly personal ways.

The feeling of doing a job that has meaning often stems from pride in accomplishment, performing satisfying work, and gaining recognition or praise. Yet these by themselves don’t guarantee a sense of meaningfulness. Often, a sense of meaningfulness accompanies transcendence of the self – arising when people see how their work matters to others, society or the environment.

For example, a garbage collector described feeling that his work mattered when he thought about how his work helps create a cleaner world for his grandchildren. Positive interactions can also generate a sense of meaningfulness. A sales associate felt meaningfulness when she worked on an exhausting task in a team setting...

About the Authors

Catherine Bailey is a professor in the department of business and management at the University of Sussex in Brighton, United Kingdom. Adrian Madden is a senior lecturer in the department of human resources and organizational behavior at the business school of the University of Greenwich in London.

Comment on this summary

More on this topic

In our Journal

2 years ago

Journal Article

Purpose Problems

The search for meaning at work: A more delicate issue than often admitted. People have always sought meaning in their lives: It’s human. And many modern civilizations rest on the quest for understanding. Nevertheless, with the decline of classic “meaning-makers” such as religions, groups and communities that either provide meaning or continually create it, people […]

2 years ago

Journal Article

Roll off Your Couch, Roll Up Your Sleeves and Get Rolling

Albert Camus’s The Plague Or: Don’t Throw Up Your Hands, Roll Up Your Sleeves! A once-in-a-century event like the COVID-19 pandemic naturally prompts us to look at history for precedents. The Spanish Flu comes to mind. But also literary fiction can offer instructive perspectives on a type of crisis that leaves no one and no […]

2 years ago

Journal Article

Daniel H. Pink

On the discrepancies between what science knows and what organizations do. Daniel H. Pink is the author of several provocative, best-selling books about business, work, creativity and behavior. His books include the New York Times bestsellers When and A Whole New Mind — as well as the #1 New York Times bestsellers Drive and To Sell is Human. Dan’s books have been translated into 42 languages, […]

3 years ago

Journal Article

Job Crafting: Take Charge

Job crafting means proactively shaping your job to enhance your well-being. Although the concept has been around for a while, the pandemic has given it new relevance. Part I of this two-part series looks at what job crafting entails. Many employees don’t work for an organization aspiring to make it onto the “best places to […]