Human Resource Development Masterclass
Human Resource Development Masterclass
Meaningful Work
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In this ninth episode of Season 2, guests Dr. Katie Bailey (King’s College London) and Dr. Sunyoung Park (Louisiana State University) discuss Meaningful Work, including:
- What is meant by the term meaningful work.
- What makes work meaningful.
- The connection between meaningful work and HRD.
- The predictors and outcomes of meaningful work.
- Measures of meaningful work.
- The benefits and risks of HRD seeking to increase the meaning that employees find in their work.
- and much more.
In the first part of the episode, Katie and Sunyoung meet one-to-one with host, Darren Short. In the second part, they are together to discuss their shared interest in Meaningful Work.
For full details on the HRD Masterclass series, visit hrdmasterclass.com. For more information on the Academy of Human Resource Development, visit ahrd.org - by being a member of AHRD, you can access bonus materials not included in this episode.
This episode is sponsored by: Interpretive Simulations - find out about their services at https://www.interpretive.com/; and by Northeastern Illinois University’s Bachelors and Masters in Human Resource Development - check them out at www.neiu.edu/academics.
Introductions
SPEAKER_03Meaningfulness is a very personal thing. So what we find meaningful is something very, very deep within us. And so when employers start trying to tell us what we should be finding meaningful, we tend not to like that very much.
SPEAKER_00Welcome to Human Resource Development Masterclass, the podcast series from the Academy of Human Resource Development, the organization that leads HRD through research. I'm your host, Darren Short, and throughout this second series, I'll be joined by leading authors, researchers and scholars to explore the fundamentals of HRD and how those are changing in the 2020s. Our focus for this episode is meaningful work, and we'll be looking at what is meant by the term meaningful work, what makes work meaningful, the connection between meaningful work and HRD, the predictors, outcomes, and measures of meaningful work, and much more. To help me, I'll be joined by two leading scholars, Dr. Katie Bailey, Professor, King's College London, and Dr. Sun Young Park, Associate Professor, Louisiana State University. In the first part of the episode, I'll chat one-to-one with each of them. Those one-to-one conversations are brought to you with the help of the generous support of our sponsor, Interpretive Simulations. Find out about their services at interpretive.com. Then for the second part, Katie and Sun Young are together to explore their shared interest in meaningful work. That group conversation is brought to you with the help of the generous support of our sponsor, Northeastern Illinois Universities, Bachelors and Masters in Human Resource Development. Check them out at neu.edu slash academics. All of the content you'll hear in this episode was recorded during October, November, and December of 2021. Right, let's dive in to meet our guests.
Conversation with Dr. Katie Bailey
SPEAKER_00Here in the first section of the episode, I'll meet one-to-one with each guest. This section is brought to you thanks to the sponsorship support of Interpretive Simulations. Since 2008, students and trainees have used Interpretive Simulations HR management simulation where participants are tasked to make challenging decisions at the HR director level in a simulated environment. Students must build a strong HR function at their simulated medium-sized organization and wrestle with the challenges of staying on budget. The simulation makes the connection between concept and practice while students learn by doing. It comes with assignments, mini cases and quizzes to reinforce core HR principles. If you'd like to receive faculty access to review the HR management simulation, visit them at www.interpretive.com and fill out a demo request. My first guest for the episode is Dr. Katie Bailey, Professor of Work and Employment at King's Business School, King's College London, where she's also head of the HRM and Employment Relations Group. Katie is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, RSA and Higher Education Academy, Academic Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, and Honorary Fellow of the Institute for Employment Studies. Katie's research has focused on meaningful work, employee engagement, and strategic HRM, and she's published numerous articles on these topics in journals such as the Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, and Journal of Management Studies. She is co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Meaningful Work, lead editor of Employee Engagement in Theory and Practice, published by Routledge, and has held editorial roles on several leading scholarly journals. Katie has won several top international awards for her research on meaningful work, including the 2021 Five Year Scholarly Impact Award from Human Resource Management Review, the 2020 Elwood F. Holt and the Third Research Excellence Award from Human Resource Development Review, and the 2019 Richard Beckhart Memorial Prize from the Sloan Management Review. Hi, Katie. Welcome to the Human Resource Development Masterclass. It's great to have you here in our episode focused on meaningful work.
SPEAKER_03Thank you, Darren. It's great to be here. Thank you for inviting me.
SPEAKER_00Perhaps a good place to start is with that term meaningful work and what's meant by the term.
SPEAKER_03Well, that's a very good question, Darren. And as you say, that's a good place to start. And on one hand, it would seem like that's quite an easy question to answer. We've all probably got a sense of what it is about our work that makes it meaningful to us. However, of course, there's an enormous amount of disagreement and debate within the academic community about what we actually mean when we say meaningful work. I suppose putting it very simply, you could say that meaningful work is the sense that your work has some value, it's significant, it's worthwhile, and it's subjectively meaningful to you as an individual. But other academics have defined it in very different ways. So, Neil Cholovsky, for example, has talked about meaningful work as being an inclusive state of being associated with intrinsic motivation. And that's a very different way of seeing what meaningful work is all about. And in fact, in the research that we did for our review of the meaningful work literature, we found a total of 28 different scales that have been developed and used in different surveys to capture what is meant by meaningfulness. Now, on the one hand, some of these are very simple one-dimensional scales that measure the extent to which somebody finds their work subjectively meaningful. That gets you so far, but it doesn't really get you very far when you're trying to think about meaningfulness. And I think there's general agreement that it's a multidimensional construct rather than just a single dimension. So a lot of the literature has been derived from the Hackman and Oldham 1970s job characteristics model that you may well be familiar with. And in that, meaningfulness is sort of seen as one of the core psychological states that mediate between different job design features on the one hand and a range of outcomes on the other. And that idea has been developed by a number of academics subsequently. For example, William Kahn, who's very famous for his work on engagement, he saw meaningfulness as a sense of getting a return on your investments in terms of physical, cognitive, and emotional energy from undertaking work that you see as valuable and useful. Conversely, meaningfulness has also been seen as one dimension of empowerment. It's also been seen as core to a workplace spirituality type approach. And here, often associated with the work of Ashmas and Duchon, meaningful work is seen as work that nourishes the employees' inner life. And so the responsibility there is on organizations to enable human flourishing by nurturing meaningful work. Others have approached this by looking at the work of theorists such as Jung and Frankel from a more of a humanities perspective. And they've argued that we all have an innate need for meaningfulness and that as human beings, we have an inherent quest for meaningfulness throughout our lives and in work as well. So this perspective tends to see meaningful workers perhaps having certain objective dimensions as well, for example, as work that enables autonomy, freedom, and recognition, as well as the more psychologically rooted idea that meaningfulness is a purely subjective phenomenon. I think within psychology as well, there's quite a lot of differences about what the precise component pieces of meaningfulness are. But it often comes back to this sense of getting a positive meaning from the work that you do and feeling that you're making a positive impact or contributing to the greater good. So there are quite a lot of different meanings associated with the construct of meaningful work there, as you can see, Darren.
SPEAKER_00So across all of those different ways of viewing meaningful work, is there a certain amount of agreement as to what determines whether an individual views their job as meaningful or not?
SPEAKER_03I'd like to say yes, but unfortunately there's quite a bit of disagreement about that as well. In the research that I've done with my colleagues, what it does tend to come down to is three core things. Firstly, work that is seen as meaningful is often perceived as being self-transcendent. In some way or another, the work that you do matters to other people, whether you're making a contribution, improving people's lives in some way, providing some kind of healing, as in the case of nurses or doctors, for example, or just simply making other people's day better. It's also something that can be quite challenging. So, whereas when we tend to think about positive psychology and constructs like engagement, that all tends to be seen in this sort of virtuous circle of positivity. Meaningfulness is slightly different in that we often realise that things are meaningful to us at times of tension or conflict, or times which we find very poignant. So, in one of the studies that I did with my colleague Adrian Madden, for example, we found that nurses talked about their experiences in working in palliative care with patients who were at the end of their lives as being times that they found their work to be both challenging but also deeply meaningful as well. And the other thing that I would note about meaningfulness is that it also tends to be very personal. In the research I did with Adrian, what we tended to find was that as soon as you ask people about what matters to them and what's meaningful about their work, they immediately start talking about things that are very personal to them. You know, what mattered to you when you were growing up or what matters in your family. One of the entrepreneurs we spoke to in our research, for example, said, I always wanted to have my own bakery business because my grandfather was a baker and I wanted him to be proud of me. So there's this very personal link that we all tend to go to when we think about what makes our work meaningful to us. So, on the one hand, you've got, well, what is it that determines whether somebody sees their work meaningful? And there's also, along with that, the process by which somebody decides that something is meaningful. And we probably know a bit less about that. There's been quite a bit of research from a more sense-making perspective that's looked at this. But certainly what we found with our research was that people sometimes don't quite realise at the time that their work is meaningful. They need to step back and reflect on their work. So maybe at the end of the working day or the end of a significant project or something, and look back over what they've done to really kind of appreciate this sense of meaningfulness. But there's quite a lot of complexity in this area about this whole link between the jobs that we do and whether we derive a sense of meaningfulness from it.
SPEAKER_00So the work that's happening kind of happens in the context of an organization that has systems and processes and happens around other people. And I'm interested in that people piece and how an employee's perception of meaningfulness of work could be impacted by their experiences with those people, like managers and colleagues.
SPEAKER_03Yes, absolutely. What goes on at work and the way that we're managed and the relationships we have with others at work, whether colleagues, managers, and also the beneficiaries of our work as well, these are all terribly important for our sense of meaningfulness. So what the research tends to show is that more relational and spiritual approaches to leadership tend to be much more closely linked with employees' experiences of their work as meaningful. And perhaps unsurprisingly, the research tends to show that where people experience something along the lines of abusive supervision from their manager or a lack of recognition, then they're much less likely to be able to access a sense of meaningfulness about their work. Similarly, there's been research which has shown that where people have positive relationships with their co-workers, that is also going to lead to a higher sense of meaningfulness. And another thing, of course, to think about is that we often get a sense of our work as meaningful when we can see or hear the impact that it's had on other people. So where you have positive relationships with the beneficiaries of your work, whether that's clients or customers or other colleagues, for example, you're able to really see that and appreciate the difference that you make. You're much more likely to find your work to be meaningful. I remember one study I did where we were talking to people working in the retail sector, and we were asking about what makes your work meaningful. It wasn't so much doing your work effectively and efficiently, being feeling that you've done your work to a high standard. It was all about the relationships with the clients and the customers. So people coming into the shop, being able to help and support them, sometimes elderly or frail people coming in as customers. The sense very much as a sales assistant that you were able not only to provide them goods and services from your employer, but also provide a lifeline for them in terms of having a chat with them about their families and so getting to know people. So these relationships that we have at work, they can be terribly important as a source of meaningfulness. And in fact, in the research I did, we tended to find that unfortunately managers are much better at destroying people's sense of meaningfulness than they are at helping build it up. And I think this is something that hasn't been looked at in quite so much depth within the literature. But certainly we found that where employees felt that they'd been taken for granted, or they were working out of alignment with their values, where their line manager was giving them pointless work to do where they couldn't really see much benefit from it, or they felt they'd been treated unfairly, then they were much less likely to find their work meaningful. And we found many, many instances where we asked people, well, what is it about your work that makes it feel meaningless? And it was nine times out of ten, it was something that their manager had done that had prompted those feelings of meaninglessness. Whereas conversely, what we found on the other side was where people found their work meaningful, then this came very much from a strong sense of what mattered to them as an individual. And actually, the actions of their managers and leaders uh didn't tend to get mentioned quite so often.
SPEAKER_00So is it possible then that an employee can experience periods of meaningfulness within a job that isn't otherwise meaningful?
SPEAKER_03I think the short answer to that is yes. I mean, one of the things that we found in our research was that uh employees experience meaningfulness in a very episodic way. People find meaning in episodes, events, projects, um, things that happen at work that suddenly make them realise actually, do you know what? My work really is quite meaningful after all. Now, I think one interesting question that perhaps hasn't yet been explored is how much of that do we need to develop this sense of meaningfulness about our work? So do we need to have that? Is it enough to have that feeling maybe once a day or once a week? Or do we need to get that feeling much more often? And how does that then interact with and balance out these moments that we all have about our jobs where we have a sense of meaninglessness?
SPEAKER_00So, what are the implications for this then for how we design jobs? Is it possible to design jobs to make them more meaningful to employees?
SPEAKER_03Yes, I think that it is. And I think that this is uh an area that's tended to be somewhat neglected in recent years, both um by academics to some extent, but also in the world of practice as well. So, what we what we know from the research that's been done is that there's a lot that can change about jobs that will make them much more meaningful. So, going right back uh in that whole um raft of academic literature, going back to Hackman and Alden, so around job enrichment, um empowerment, having tasks that uh are significant in the sense you can see the end point, you can see the beneficiaries of it. You've got a chance to use a variety of different skills, and you're doing work that really matters to you. All of these things will be important in terms of finding a sense of meaningfulness in your work. There's also been quite a bit of research that suggested that work we find challenging, so not necessarily easy work, but work we find challenging, that gives us a certain degree of autonomy and that has an element of creativity to it. All of these will boost our sense of finding the work to be meaningful. The other side of that, of course, is it's not just the job itself, it's also the environment that we work within. We were talking just now about workplace relationships and these interactions that we have at work that give us a sense of meaningfulness, um, as well as the job itself. So it's the job, it's the work relationships, um, it's our relationship with our line manager, but it's also about the organisation as a whole. So, do we feel that we fit within the organisation? And do we work for an organization which has similar values to our values and where we look up to the leaders as inspiring people who themselves find their work meaningful? So, all of these things together create a kind of an ecosystem where people are much more able to find meaning. Having said all of that, I think one of the things that emerged quite strongly from the research that I did with Adrian is that meaningfulness is not really something you can mandate very easily to people. You can't tell people, well, this is we've got this wonderful purpose in our organisation, therefore you should find your work meaningful. Because people are going to look around and say, well, the organisation might be aspiring to kind of make the world a better place or whatever the purpose is, but actually, my job doesn't really enable me to do that. I don't feel I'm making the world a better place and doing this particular task. So it's always going to be very subjective, and people don't like being dictated to and told to what they should be finding meaningful in their work. They want to be able to find it for themselves. So the manager's task in many ways here is to create an environment or an ecosystem which enables people to feel that sense of meaningfulness and to discover it for themselves.
SPEAKER_00Does this mean then that there's a potential for a negative response when managers attempt to create this sense of meaningfulness with an employee or with a team? That one of the risks of trying too hard to focus on meaningfulness is that you could actually get a negative opposite reaction.
SPEAKER_03That is a very interesting point. And then this is something that I looked at in a paper that I wrote with some of my other colleagues a few years ago. And I think the real challenge here is to retain a sense of authenticity around meaningfulness. One of the issues and problems with meaningful work is that it can very quickly tip over into being something quite exploitative. So where people find a great deal of meaning in their work, there's always the risk that they're going to overinvest and end up with a very poor work-life balance and not enough emotional cognitive energy left over for the other areas of their lives and their other important relationships. And so, what we're looking for, I suppose, around meaningful work is a sense that we're asking something that's fair of people and we're asking it in an authentic way. So when you say could it, could it spill over into being something negative, it could do so in a number of different ways. It could be associated with inauthenticity and where people perceive that their organization isn't being straight with them and that they're essentially being exploited by their organization and asked to buy into something that isn't real or authentic, then that can lead to something which we described in our research as existential labour. So putting forward a false front and pretending that you buy into the organizational rhetoric when you don't really. And the other side of that is that calling on people to invest and find their work meaningful can lead to overinvestment on their part and then poor work-life balance and perhaps poor decisions about how best to allocate their time and energies across all of the different life roles that we have.
SPEAKER_00So, in light of all of the things that you've shared about meaningful work, what do you see as the connection between meaningful work and HRD?
SPEAKER_03Well, there are many ways in which meaningful work is important in the realm of HRD. And I think one of the ways in which it matters is in this notion. Of uh spiritual approaches to workplace management. So spirituality approaches essentially stress the importance of the inner self and the soul at work and the responsibility of the employer to nurture an environment where people get a sense of purpose and community and feel that they're being managed with authenticity. So from a spirituality perspective, meaningful work is hugely important as an outcome of a more spiritual and inclusive way of managing people. There are also implications, as well, I think, in terms of learning and development and organisation development. So, for example, how can learning and development interventions help create a sense that the organisation is firstly investing in people and therefore enabling people to take on more complex, challenging roles that may then provide them with more opportunities to find meaningfulness? But also learning and development and OD around the whole area of meaningful work, which is an area that I know my colleague Mario Luxviers works in and I have worked in as well, working with organizations to help them have these conversations about meaning and purpose and really bring it to the surface because at the moment it's not something that we tend to talk about that much in the work context. There are also implications as well, I think, for individuals' careers and for understanding career behaviour. So again, my colleague Mario and her co-researchers found that different facets of meaningful work can influence the way in which people engage with their careers and indeed might decide to leave an organisation if they don't feel that they're getting meaningful work. I don't know if you've seen in the press recently, Darren, but there's been an awful lot of talk about the great resignation that we're seeing. Now we're coming out from COVID, and much of that has been attributed to lack of meaning in work. So where people don't find their work to be very meaningful, then the research suggests that they're much more likely to quit. And this is a very important issue from an HRD perspective. I think, as well, there's this whole notion of how capable our leaders are at managing meaning at work. And this isn't something that's normally included in many management or leadership development programmes, yet it's hugely important when you look at the research findings in terms of the role of the leader and the manager, not just in helping people find meaning, but also in avoiding actions that will destroy people's sense of meaningfulness. So there's a lot to think about there as well. And I think finally, given that high levels of meaningful work have been associated with important outcomes like engagement, commitment, motivation, low levels of absenteeism and turnover, then understanding what it is that makes work meaningful and how we can work together in our organizations to create an environment where people can find meaning becomes hugely important from an HRD perspective. And I suppose in many ways that's the real challenge that we all face.
SPEAKER_00Well, Katie, thank you so much indeed for your time today. I've really enjoyed our conversation on meaningful work.
SPEAKER_03Well, thank you very much, Darren. It's been great to have the opportunity. I'm delighted to have been invited, and thank you so much for your time as well.
SPEAKER_00Perfect. Well, please stay with us and we'll have you back later in the episode for our group conversation with Sun Young. Till then, thank you so much indeed.
SPEAKER_03Thank you.
Conversation with Dr. Sunyoung Park
SPEAKER_00My second guest for the episode is Dr. Sun Young Park, Associate Professor, Jones S. Davis Endowed Professor in the School of Leadership and Human Resource Development at Louisiana State University. She also serves as Associate Director and Doctoral Programme Coordinator in the school. Her research interests include organizational culture and behavior, learning and performance, and research trends in HRD. She has published numerous articles and book chapters related to diverse HRD topics. She's been AHRD Conference Program Chair, Proceeding Editor, and TRAC Chair. Sun Yang has received several research awards, including the AHRD Early Career Scholar Award and outstanding paper awards from multiple journals. She is an editorial board member for Human Resource Development Quarterly, Human Resource Development Review, and European Journal of Training and Development. Hi, Sun Young. Welcome to the Human Resource Development Masterclass. It's great to have you here in our episode focused on meaningful work.
SPEAKER_01Yes, hello. I'm so glad to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me.
SPEAKER_00To start us off, I'd be really interested to hear about the research that you've done on meaningful work and what you've learned from that research.
SPEAKER_01So I have two studies on meaningful work. My first study is about examining the relationship among organizational culture, job characteristics, supervisor support, meaningful work, and organizational commitment. So from this study, I found that diverse contextual factors in the workplace can promote employees' perception of meaningfulness in work. So I think that is very important finding from my study. In addition, their perception of meaningful work can help productive behavior and outcomes, such as commitment to the organization. In the second study, I reviewed multiple measures of meaningful work to better understand this concept by identifying the features of each measure. I learned from this review that the constructs and dimensions of meaningful work measures are different according to how to define and conceptualize meaningful work.
SPEAKER_00So, based on that research, what factors have you seen result in a sense of meaningful work? I suppose, in other words, what are some of the predictors of meaningful work?
SPEAKER_01I think that understanding the predictors of meaningful work would be useful for both researchers and practitioners to think about how to promote the meaningfulness in work. So based on the finding from previous studies, the predictors of meaningful work can be categorized into individual, group, job, leadership, and organizational factors. Individual factors are related to personal belief, values, attitudes, and interpretations about work and motivation, such as intruding motivations and pro-social motivations. Age, genders and occupations can be considered as individual characteristics affecting meaningfulness in work too. Group related factors are workplace relationships and recognitions from colleagues and managers. In other words, if employees have better working relationships and good recognition from colleagues and managers, their perception of meaningfulness in work would be higher and better. Sub-related factors include autonomy, developmental opportunities, feedback from the job and their work, sub-enrichment, sub-crafting person's upfit, skill variety, task significance, and workload. Employees can feel their work is more meaningful when leaders are inspired, communicating, ethical, empowering, supporting, and considerate. Example of leadership variables as the predictors of meaningful work include empowering leadership, ethical leadership, sovereignty leadership, spiritual leadership, transformational leadership, and supervisor support. Example of productive organization culture could be ethical culture, family friendly culture, right gender culture, and supportive cultures. HR practice can include selection, socialization, skills and career development. From a practical perspective, these predictors may provide insights on how organizations and HR professionals can foster employees' perception of meaningfulness in work by adjusting the job, collaborating with leaders and managers, and creating a supportive workplace culture. These predictors also can help scholars conduct further research to explore the interrelationship among individual and contextual factors affecting meaningful work.
SPEAKER_00And then what do you see as the main outcomes of meaningful work?
SPEAKER_01We can find out many studies examine the notable outcomes of meaningful work, including KT's article. I think that these outcomes are more related to individual behavior and perception and performance rather than organizational outcomes. So when employees perceive that their work is meaningful and important, they are more likely to perform well, be satisfied with their job, engaged in their work, be committed to their organizations, feel better in doing work, and feel balanced between work and life. In other words, how employees perceive their work as meaningful can improve their job performance, job satisfaction, work engagement, organizational commitment, psychological well-being, and work-life balance or work-life enrichment. Meaningful work also can decrease employees' turnable intentions and reduce the levels of their stress and depression. So I think these outcomes show the importance and contribution of meaningful work to employees in different ways, as well as cover the common and popular HR topics.
SPEAKER_00So presumably, in order to do research on meaningful work, you've had to use measures, i.e., there must be a way of measuring or gaining data on employees and their sense of meaningfulness of their work. So what measures exist or what measures have you used to gather data on meaningful work?
SPEAKER_01So there are a lot of measures to assess the individual perception of meaningful work. Like Katie mentioned, 28 measures. These measures include diverse aspects of meaningful work according to the author's perspectives. I think it is another evidence that there is little consensus on defining and conceptualizing meaningful work. I would like to introduce several measures in terms of general purpose, specific occupations, and related broader concepts. For the general purpose, the work and meaning inventory and the comprehensible meaningful work scales are frequently adopted. The first, the work and meaning inventory, WAMI, developed by Stigger and colleagues, is the most widely used and cited more than 1000 times. It has 10 items with three dimensions. The first dimension is positive meaning, which focuses on meaningful career, life, job and purpose. The second dimension is meaning making through work, which emphasizes personal growth, understanding myself, and sense making of the world. The third dimension is motivation for the greater good. It is related to a desire for making differences in the world. This measure views meaningful work as the subjective experience of significance in doing work. The comprehensible meaningful work scale C MWS developed by Lips, Mirzma and Wright is a process-oriented measure. It includes 28 items with seven dimensions, developing the inner self, unity with others, expressing full potential, service to others, reality, inspiration and balancing tensions. These measures emphasize the features contributing to the fit between individual and work. There are also occupation-related measures. This measure has 22 items with six dimensions, including development and learning for personal interests and competencies, and expressiveness and identification at work. Another measure is the meaning in work scale, MIWS. This measure emphasizes meaningful work as an intrinsic motivator to improve nurses, job satisfaction and decrease burn out in the healthcare sector. Some meaningful work measures are the sub-dimensions of the instruments or broader concepts, such as spirituality and work cognitions. The major spirituality at work has meaning at work dimension as one of seven dimensions. It is related to what gives the work personal meaning. So work cognition inventory emphasizes the organizational experiences, job experiences and people experiences in the workplace. In this inventory, meaningful work is part of job experiences and refers to the extent to which individuals perceive their jobs are important to others inside and outside the organization. Hope this information can be useful to understand the concepts and features of meaningful work.
SPEAKER_00It makes me wonder whether organizations are able to help employees find meaning in work, as in if employees currently don't see the work as meaningful, is it possible for organizations to make them see it as meaningful?
SPEAKER_01I think so, although it would be not perfect, because uh so how how organization can make employees feel more meaningful in uh doing their job. So I think it is related to organizational culture or workplace climate. For example, if I my organization provide more um family-friendly culture and policies to employees, in other words, organization trying to provide more support and help for employees to proceed their work in an easy way or efficient way. Employees can feel their organization care about them. So, in this way, employees can focus more on their work. The reason why organizations uh care about them because my work and myself is important. So I think that is some kind of a connection between organizational support and uh motivating or uh promoting the perception of meaningfulness in work.
SPEAKER_00That feels a good transition to talking a bit about the changes that have happened in the workplace, particularly those that have happened recently as a result of the pandemic. I suppose one of the biggest changes that we've seen has been the move towards remote work. And I was wondering how you see that affecting meaningful work.
SPEAKER_01The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the landscape of work, including where people work. So more organizations have allowed their employees to work from home or work from anywhere, and they continue and expand the extent of the remote work arrangement. For example, working remotely allows employees to have more flexibilities and efficiency in relation to time, physical space and work process by adopting different types of technology. However, employees also experience loneliness, emotional exhaustion, stress and anxiety, and a feeling of always working because of remote work environments. So accordingly, this work arrangement remote work can change individual perception of meaningful work. Employees perception of meaningfulness in working remotely can affect the positive meaning of work, meaning making through work and the motivation of influence or greater good which I introduce as the three dimensions of meaningful work in one measure. So that is kind of example so in this sense it would be it would be important to focus on how employees experience in demo work are related to perception of meaningfulness based on the change in work.
SPEAKER_00The final question I'd be really interested in your perspective on what you see as the relationship between HRD and meaningful work.
SPEAKER_01I think a basic um assumption of HRD is to help employees maximize their potential and provide more opportunity to develop their self. So in line with that kind of assumption meaningful work can provide basic motivation why I do this why I do this work in my organization. So meaningful work can promote positive outcomes and behavior of employees like satisfaction, performance, engagement and commitment and psychological well being to improve the employees performance and well being meaningful work. The conception of meaningfulness in work is kind of a fundamental basic of employees so that's why that is the very important connection between HID and meaningful work.
SPEAKER_00That's wonderful well thank you so much indeed for your time today Sun Young it's been wonderful having a conversation with you about meaningful work.
SPEAKER_01Thank you.
SPEAKER_00It was a great pleasure well please stay with us and we'll have you back in the next section of the episode for our group conversation with Katie but for the time being thank you so much indeed.
SPEAKER_01Thank you.
Group conversation with Katie and Sunyoung
SPEAKER_00Up next we have the group discussion where my guests are together to discuss their shared passion for the episode's topic. This discussion is brought to you thanks to the sponsorship support of Northeastern Illinois University. NEIU offers both bachelor's and master's degrees in HRD as well as a new graduate certificate in workplace learning and performance. NEIU's HRD program is designed to prepare new and experienced HRD practitioners to analyse design implement and evaluate practices and systems that promote individual, group and organizational learning and performance through training and development, organization development and career development. For more information please visit neiu dotu slash academics or contact Dr Brian Vivona program coordinator at BHEN VIVONA at NEIU.edu Welcome back to the HRD Masterclass podcast. Our focus for this episode is meaningful work and I've already met one-to-one with Katie Bailey and with Sun Young Park and for this final section of the episode we're all together for our group chat. So welcome back Katie and Sun Young.
SPEAKER_01It's lovely to be here thank you Darren. Thank you I'm so glad to be here again.
SPEAKER_00So for our group discussion I'd like to expand a little on some of the topics that we touched on in our one-to-ones and I was reflecting back on those conversations and found myself thinking more about what makes work meaningful. Essentially what makes work meaningful work and is it something to do with the skills people are using or the service they're providing or other factors and I I love your thoughts on that.
SPEAKER_03Well this is a huge question um Darren and it goes very much to the heart of the whole issue about well what do we mean when we say meaningful work and and and as we highlighted in the paper that that we published in Human Resource Development Review there were so many different definitions of meaningful work. And I think part of it you're right you when you hit the nail on the head when you said is it about the skills that we use because I know from the research that we've done people can't really find their work meaningful if they don't feel that they're using their skills and abilities and they're doing a really good job. So one of the things I often say is that nobody goes to work and says my job was really easy today and I didn't work very hard but it was incredibly meaningful. People don't say that people often find their work to be very challenging, difficult, it uses their skills and because of that they're able to find meaning in it. But meaningful work as you've really suggested as well in your question does go far beyond just using the skills that we've got. For work to be meaningful I think there's general agreement that we need to see the benefits in some way of the work that we're doing for other people. So this could be feeling that we're part of a bigger community who are working together or it could be that we're doing work that delivers some kind of beneficial outcomes for other people makes their life better in some way. So it's about us as individuals and feeling we're using our skills and abilities with developing and growing but it's also about feeling that we're doing something beyond the self. We're doing something for other people for society in collaboration with other people in some way or other now what specifically that looks like is going to vary enormously from one type of job to another but broadly speaking I think it's important to note that meaningful work isn't just about us and the work that we do and using our skills. It definitely goes beyond that.
SPEAKER_01Yes I totally agree with Katie. So I just want to warm things so uh Katie already mentioned about the feeling about my work is contributing positively to others and their lives and feeling about I am enabled to benefit for great greater good through my work is a very important part. And then I also emphasize autonomy because autonomy is a sense of cousin in people's work and undertakings where they feel ownership for their actions. So when people have a sense of ownership of their work feeling that they are able to what interest them this makes the work feel personally meaningful for them. So autonomy and then some like feeling to benefit for the greater good are related to how much we are able to realize and express ourselves through our works. So I think that is a key path to what makes work meaningful.
SPEAKER_00So listening to those answers makes me wonder about whether it's possible for somebody at different phases of their life to change what's meaningful for them. For example they might start a job and it feels meaningful but a few years later that meaning has somehow been lost or they've changed and so is is that how it could be experienced by people that just because a job's meaningful at one point in their life doesn't make it meaningful at another it's not just a job intrinsically of its on it in its own right that is meaningful.
SPEAKER_03It's that interaction between the individual and the job that they're doing so two people doing the same job one might find it hugely meaningful and the other might not find it meaningful at all. So if we think about it in that sort of dynamic way we can see meaningful work as a process that kind of evolves and fluctuates over time. So it's entirely feasible that someone can start out doing a job and then over time start to find it a lot less meaningful or conversely a lot more meaningful and that can be down to a whole range of different factors. As we get older I think perhaps sometimes our priorities change and that would be a really interesting area for future research to explore how our sense of meaningfulness changes as we grow older. But it's also due to the fact that organisations themselves obviously are dynamic and changing over time as our jobs. It's often the case that we start off doing a job and then through processes of job crafting or just general change reorganisation at the organisational level we can find ourselves ending up doing a job that's quite different from the one that we originally started out doing. So I think there's a number of different things at play there that can really influence the way in which our sense of meaningfulness can fluctuate and change over time so that we can start off with a sense of meaningfulness but then that ebbs away.
SPEAKER_00So as we explored earlier in the episode meaningful work isn't a binary concept and so people experience degrees of meaningfulness in their work. So in light of this I'm wondering what do we know about how people progress through those degrees and can that progression be measured for example by an organization that's looking to track meaningfulness over time so uh technically we can trace the impact and outcomes of meaningful work over time through longitudinal studies.
SPEAKER_01For example one study reported that meaningful work is a predictor of living one's calling over time another study showed that autonomy and task significance can positively affect meaningful work over time. However these studies did not discuss how people experience different levels of meaningful work in their work over time. They just focused more on the reciprocal dynamics of meaningful work over time in relation to work characteristics and context most measures of meaningful work emphasize when and how people feel their work is meaningful based on the definition and multiple aspects of meaningful work. These measures explain how people feel their work is more meaningful or less meaningful over time and their differences within the scales over time. So to discuss the development and evolution of meaningful work over time we could consider more integrated approach from a long-term perspective by combining quantitative and qualitative methods.
SPEAKER_00The more we talk about meaningful work in the episode the more it becomes clear to me that finding meaningful work is a benefit both to the individual and to the organization that employs them. I'm also left wondering whether it's possible for everybody to experience that.
SPEAKER_03So in other words is finding meaningful work a viable goal for every person well interestingly enough Darren when um I did my qualitative research with Adrian Madden a few years ago we talked to people working in a whole range of different types of jobs so we talked to priests, artists, stonemasons, we talked to people working in shops, we talked to solicitors we talked to people doing a whole host of different jobs. And one of the interesting things for me that emerged from that study was that just about everybody could find something about their job that they found pretty meaningful. Conversely a lot of people not everyone but a lot of them also were able to see things that they found meaningless about their work. And reflecting back on the previous question I think it was when we asked people about this sort of so what do you see as meaningful and what do you see as meaningless about your work it was interesting to see that people can hold both of these ideas within their minds at the same time about their job. And this really brought home to me that if we're just asking people about aspects of meaningfulness of their work, we're missing out on finding out about the things that they find meaningless. And so one of the things that I sort of took from this was well actually none of us pretty much is going to be finding our work meaningful day in, day out. I don't think anybody goes into work on a Monday at nine o'clock and leaves on Friday at five o'clock or whatever your hours are and says gosh do you know what I found my work really meaningful for that whole week. I think meaningfulness ebbs and flows over time depending on the kind of work that we're doing, the tasks we've got and for some people it is going to be easier to access that sense of meaningfulness than it is for others. Some jobs obviously are perhaps harder to find meaning in than others although I was interesting in our study that people who were working as street sweepers, refuse collectors they were able to see quite a lot of meaning in their work as I mentioned in our earlier call. And so I don't think it's necessarily down to the nature of the work itself exclusively as to whether we can or can't find meaning. A lot of it comes down to other factors in the workplace and I don't know if Sun Yung found this in her research as well and it's about job design it's about as as Sun Yung said earlier it's about autonomy and control. It's about what kind of line manager we've got so I think at any moment in time we're all in a fairly complex situation in terms of how much meaning we're able to see and experience in our work although people can feel different about the reverable meaningfulness or eventually most people pursue their meaningfulness in work.
SPEAKER_01So meaning because I think the meaningful work concerns about the employees or people's overall wellbeing so for work to be meaningful individuals need to identify personal meaningful contribution made by their own effort and then feel they can benefit the great good through their work. So through this process employees can have higher motivation or higher productivity have more responsibility and ownership toward their work and organization while enjoying greater well-being. So that is some kind of basic flow and logic so that's why organizations need to provide appropriate conditions for the growth of meaningful work.
SPEAKER_00Now all of this is happening in a context so an individual's working within an organization that has a culture and that culture's in a country that has its own culture. So I'm wondering what's the relationship between meaningful work and culture and are there certain cultures where it's easier for employees to find meaning in work that perhaps may have less meaning in a different culture?
SPEAKER_01I would say that national culture could affect the perception of meaningful work because culture may influence individuals experience the meaning. So from my perspective the cultural context of meaningful work should be considered considered to fully understand this concept. So most findings about meaningful work came from research conducted in Europe and North America although there are increasing studies in different countries and regions. So it is not clear if meaningful work is equally important to employees outside Europe and North America areas in different cultural economic, social and or political contexts according to one study if cultural norms emphasize work as a pathway to individual fulfillment and well being these cultural aspects could have a positive influence on individual perception of meaningful work. In relation to national culture I would like to remind two points first describing culture and describing individuals embedded within that culture are totally different. Second meaningful work could have different meanings and interpretations according to different cultures while there would be the common consensus of meaningful work I think the meaningful work should be understood in both universal terms in each cultural perspective.
SPEAKER_03And I think that would be very welcome to have more research on that point. I think the other thing to note is that other aspects of context can be very important as well. I edited a special issue of the Journal of management studies a few years ago and one of the papers that we included in that special issue by Giovanni de Boeck and colleagues looked at the how people's experience of meaningfulness was very much influenced by what was happening in terms of what was being valued at a national level. So in this particular context looking at people working in Germany looking after refugees and when the national context in terms of the attitude towards these refugees changed then it was much harder for people who were working in those centres to find meaning in their work because the the national debate had moved on and there were some growing concerns about the number of refugees coming into the country and the the discourse around refugees had completely changed. And this made it quite a challenging environment for the refugee workers to to be operating in. And I think there's a lot more that we need to know about the influence of national culture but also what's happening within countries in terms of what we value as societies and how that is then translated into experiences of work as meaningful.
SPEAKER_00So, as a final question, I'd like to focus in about the implications for HRD. And I'm wondering about what advice you have for HRD professionals on how they can leverage meaningful work, perhaps as a means to increase employee engagement or job satisfaction or other key outcomes. And in thinking about that, are there any risks that HRD should be aware of when working on meaningful work as a way to or as a means to increase employee engagement?
SPEAKER_03Well, I do think that there are some risks in trying to manage meaningfulness, and that is that it can really easily tip over into something that's perceived as quite manipulative. And this is because a lot of research has shown, and certainly our research supported this as well, that meaningfulness is a very personal thing. So what we find meaningful is something very, very deep within us that goes beyond what's merely happening at work. And so when employers start trying to tell us what we should be finding meaningful, um, we tend not to like that very much. We want to find meaning for ourselves. And so in some of the articles that we've done, what we've emphasized is it's important for employers to try and create an environment or an ecosystem where people are able to find that sense of meaningfulness for themselves. And we talked about uh looking at the jobs that people are being asked to do, the individual tasks that make up those jobs, the organisational purpose itself, and the interactions and relationships that people have, and thinking about how we can create opportunities for people to have a sense of their work as being meaningful in those four domains. And it needn't be very expensive, difficult initiatives, but creating opportunities for people to maybe talk and interact with beneficiaries of their work, making sure that there's a positive work environment where people are treated with respect and decency, and that people have a well-designed job that adheres to principles of good design. So, while on the one hand, it's important to create these opportunities for people to find meaning in their work. Another thing we found was it's important for line managers to avoid destroying people's sense of meaningfulness. So things like being a bullying manager, uh, not acknowledging your employees, um, not really considering what people's work looks like and how they experience it. Some of these things can really undermine people's sense of their work as being meaningful. So it's important to both avoid those while also creating an environment which is conducive to people finding that sense of meaningfulness.
SPEAKER_01I like Katie's point. To answer this question, I do like to consider the role of HRD practitioners in organizational settings. So I think the critical role of HRD practitioners is to balance and coordinate the needs and events from both employees and organizations to initiate productive changes for both parties. So this is also related to how to align individual purposes with organization goals. So, in this sense, when HID professionals need to use meaningful work as a means to increase employee engagement, they should discuss meaningful work in the context of individual employees' job, law, group and organization. Because organizational context matter when they work on meaningful work. So another point if HRD practitioners want to apply some findings from research in their organization and practice, they should check the current organization readiness and situation. So that is the another uh consideration that HRD practitioners should uh think.
SPEAKER_00It sounds there as if there's real benefits to the organization if HRD can approach meaningful work in an authentic way. But that there's real risks if HRD seeks to essentially be manipulative in using meaningful work. Is that a is that a reasonable way of thinking about it?
SPEAKER_03Yes, absolutely. I think um the research does tend to show uh in a number of different contexts, really, that when organisations are trying to manipulate people or manage inauthentically, then employees know what's going on. They know if there's this big rhetoric reality gap, um, and people are going to vote with their feet. We're seeing the great resignation at the moment in many countries. Uh, and one of the reasons that's been attributed to this is people seeking more meaningful work. And it's important, I think, for employers to think about well, how do we do that in an authentic, honest way? I mean, if you can't offer people interesting work to do, then you know, don't pretend that the jobs are fantastic. I think people appreciate and value honesty and the opportunity to get involved in conversations in the organisation about how things can be improved. You know, don't tell people about meaningful work, ask people how their work is experienced, what it's like for them, and what opportunities they can see to enhance that sense of meaningfulness.
SPEAKER_00Well, unfortunately, we've reached the end of our time for today, but I wanted to say a big thank you to both of you. I've really enjoyed our conversations and learned a lot. So thank you both so much for being a part of our discussion on meaningful work.
SPEAKER_03Thank you so much for inviting me, Darren. I've really enjoyed talking with you and with Sun Jung.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, thank you so much. Yeah, I really have a great experience, a wonderful experience.
Wrap-up
SPEAKER_00Thank you so much for joining me for the episode. It was wonderful spending time with Katie and with Sun Young. If you enjoyed the episode, check out all of our others. There were eleven episodes in the first season, and we're releasing a further eleven here in the second. Between them, they provide access to conversations with over 50 leading HRD scholars. New episodes release weekly. To learn more about the series, check out HRDmasterclass.com and to learn about the Academy of Human Resource Development, check out ahrd.org. By becoming a member, you can access extra bonus materials not included in the podcast. Also, don't forget to look into our sponsors, Interpretive Simulations. Find out about their services at interpretive.com. And by Northeastern Illinois University, check them out at neuru.edu slash academics. I'm looking forward to being with you in our next episode. Until then, this is Darren Short signing off from the HRD Masterclass.com.
