When people think about doing work that’s meaningful, one picture that likely comes to mind is someone in a helping profession—say, a hospice nurse tending to a dying patient in their final days, providing comfort and easing their transition.
Caring for the sick and dying is one way people find purpose in their work, but there are many more, and they look wildly different. These experiences give rise to what Aristotle called eudaimonia, a sense of flourishing.
“It applies to everyone and not just people in nonprofits or stereotypically meaningful jobs,” says Ben Rogers, assistant professor of management and organization. “That worth can come from what you’re doing, it can come from who you’re doing it for. It can be a million different things.”
For some, it’s working in an organization that strives to solve society’s challenges, fueled by a sense of hope. Others derive satisfaction from self-improvement and mastering new skills, or doing a difficult task that requires sustained effort—uplifting experiences that a financial analyst can have just as much as a social worker. For many, it’s not the job itself that is a source of meaning but what it enables outside of work—the ability to provide for a family, for instance. “Everyone falls into one or more of those buckets,” Rogers says. “It’s really difficult for people to sustain work for any meaningful amount of time if they’re not doing it for some greater purpose.”
One challenge is that people often don’t connect the meaning they find in work with a larger life purpose, Rogers says. Because jobs often demand sacrifices of time and effort, it’s natural to think there’s a trade-off between meaning at work and fulfillment in life.
But the two aren’t mutually exclusive, he says: Work is part of life, not a separate domain. What people find meaningful in life can find echoes in their work, and vice versa. For example, someone who enjoys working with others in their town on quality-of-life goals may get that same endorphin rush leading a feel-good community project at work. “People don’t often think of how these things fit together and how they can match up or be complementary,” Rogers says.
Assistant professor of management and organization Benjamin Rogers
With his collaborators, Rogers has studied how personal narrative can boost meaningfulness through a “growth mindset” at work. A person may believe she can acquire a new skill, or may be convinced she can’t because it was hard one time when she tried it. The resulting story that she tells herself drives the level to which she finds work meaningful, they found. In one of the studies, an openness to learning new things not only created a greater sense of meaning at work but led to a desire to help other employees who also want to grow.
These narratives throw light on what mythologist Joseph Campbell called the hero’s journey. In this classic plot structure, the protagonist faces and overcomes challenges, leading to personal growth and transformation. To understand this narrative in the context of work, Rogers guided participants through a writing task to retell their life and career stories as a hero’s journey. “When people saw their journeys in their careers as a hero’s journey, they felt like their jobs themselves were more meaningful. They were able to see the results of this big journey, this story that they're a part of," he said.
Finding meaning through work is a central theme of recent papers by faculty in the Management and Organization Department, on topics ranging from the mixed feelings that gig grocery shoppers had about public praise of their work during the Covid-19 pandemic (Assistant Professor Curtis Chan) to how female managers, surprisingly, are more likely than male managers to limit gender equity policies (Assistant Professor Vanessa Conzon).
Professor and William McKiernan '78 Family Faculty Fellow Judith Clair
Judith Clair, professor of management and organization and a William S. McKiernan ’78 Family Faculty Fellow, has studied the role of hope in medical settings and in organizations that tackle entrenched global problems. In the daily grind of often-difficult work, it pulls people together toward a meaningful goal.
But hope can be crushed. In one organization Clair studied, a center for women who had been sexually exploited, staff and clients were devastated when a client who had become a role model for her success overcoming addiction died of an overdose. They began to question the value of their work. “The fact of her success supported the hope culture itself,” Clair explains, but this tragedy showed how “failures can be extremely emotionally difficult for the collective.”
And yet, setbacks can amplify meaning when they lead to renewed commitment. Clair says, with a splash of hope: “Meaning still can be found in a variety of really horrible circumstances—times when hope seems hard to achieve.”
