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Purpose plays an important role in the construction of meaning and meaningfulness of work. This research examined the impact of purpose and purposefulness in the workplace. Study I developed a two-factor purposefulness at work survey and established a taxonomy of purpose through qualitative analysis of personal purpose statements. The model delineates eight types of personal purpose that range from being very self-centered to being very others oriented. The construct validity of the purposefulness at work survey and the robustness of the purpose taxonomy were tested in Study II. All purposes don't work equally. Others-oriented purposes were associated with higher level of purposefulness at work than were self-oriented purposes. In turn, purposefulness was positively correlated with two work-related outcomes - work engagement and organizational commitment. This paper advances the meaning and purpose literature by specifying purpose content and connecting personal purpose to employee experience.
Keywords: meaning of work, purpose of work, work engagement, organizational commitment
INTRODUCTION
If you were to get enough money to live as comfortably as you would like for the rest of your life, would you continue to work, or would you stop working? This is the question that has appeared on the General Social Survey conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago since 1973. Over a 45-year period (1973-2018), the survey has found relatively stable results. On average about 70% of the respondents in the U.S. said they would keep on working. Work to many people is more than just a paid job and W-2 (Berg et al., 2010). It is an important part of their lives.
Frankl's (1959) Man's Search for Meaning catalyzed psychological studies on the meaning of life, with its assertation that an essential condition of being human is the desire to live meaningful lives. In recent years, research interest in meaning has proliferated among organizational scholars (Rosso et al., 2010; Rothausen & Henderson, 2019). A breadth of personal and organizational consequences have been found to be associated with the perception of meaning and meaningfulness in work, including psychological well-being (Arnold et al., 2007), job satisfaction (Steger et al., 2012), work engagement (May et al., 2004); organizational identification (Pratt et al., 2006), performance (Kendall, 2019), and creativity (Cohen-Meitar et al., 2009).
Organizations today...