Exploring the Multiple Sources of Work Meaningfulness: The Roles of Social Integration and Cultural Diversity

Abstract

As the organization and management scholarship moves beyond the hedonic (i.e. pleasure-oriented) perspectives of work behavior which focus on the cognitive evaluation of experiences such as happiness and pleasure, researchers start to increasingly explain the concept of work meaningfulness as the intrinsic driver of salient work behavior such as job satisfaction, employee well-being, work engagement and commitment. Assessing the perception of meaningfulness experienced by employees becomes particularly important, given that the existing theories of workplace behavior are not satisfactory in explaining human behavior within the economic, social and environmental challenges of the 21st century. However, although the literature on work meaningfulness directs considerable effort to identify the drivers of establishing a subjective experience of work meaningfulness, this stream of research rather highlights the characteristics of the job such as autonomy, skill variety, and task identity promoting the meaningfulness associated with the work or the self-oriented mechanisms such as self-concordance, self-esteem, and self-efficacy in the construction of work meaningfulness. Hence, the precedence of self-oriented intra-psychic factors which underline the cognitive explanations of work meaningfulness, lead to the neglect of the concept itself as well as its antecedents such as the social and cultural drivers in understanding how the work meaningfulness is constructed. Therefore, this research aims to empirically examine the role of two rather neglected factors in meaningfulness context namely; social integration and cultural diversity in the perceived meaningfulness of work. The data collected from a sample of 216 employees through a survey methodology is analyzed through Structural Equations Modeling (SEM) in AMOS 21. The results of the analysis show that, social integration have a positive relationship with work meaningfulness whereas cultural diversity have a negative relationship with work meaningfulness (i.e. positive meaning and meaning making through work) except for greater good motivations. Indeed this research extends the theory on work meaningfulness by developing an integrative model involving the simultaneous and concurrent effects of both social and cultural mechanisms within the organization and empirically testing this social and cultural web of meaning.