Search results for "meaningful work"
showing 9 items of 9 documents
Transformational leadership and depressive symptoms among employees : mediating factors
2014
Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the link between transformational leadership and depressive symptoms among employees is mediated by such personal resources as occupational self-efficacy, perceived meaningfulness of the work, and work-related rumination.Design/methodology/approach– The study was conducted using questionnaires among 557 Finnish municipal employees in various occupations. The statistical analysis was based on structural equation modeling. A multiple mediation model enabled us to investigate the specific indirect effects of each mediator. Model comparison was applied to ascertain whether the mediation should be considered as full or partial.Findings– Re…
Meaningful Work Protects Teachers’ Self-Rated Health under Stressors
2020
A sense of meaningfulness is one of the most sought?after work characteristics which has been associated with employees’ well-being. This study explored whether meaningful work enhances self-rated health in challenging work context, under the stressors of distractions, unnecessary tasks, and unreasonable tasks. Data was collected from Finnish teachers (N = 1,658) and structural equation modelling was employed with the latent interaction terms. Results showed that meaningful work was associated with better self-rated health and the stressors were associated with poorer self-rated health. Protective potential of meaningful work against stressors was also discovered, as meaningful work mitigat…
Hobby, career or vocation? Meanings in sports coaching and their implications for recruitment and retention of coaches
2020
Rationale/Purpose: Traditional European sports clubs are facing increasing pressures to professionalise their services, while also encountering difficulties in the recruitment and retention of the coaching workforce. We used the concept of meaningful work to explore why coaching is worthwhile to coaches and how they have responded to the changes in the structural and narrative context of their work. \ud \ud Methodology: Drawing on narrative inquiry, we explored the various meanings and justifications that athletics (track and field) coaches assign to coaching in Finland and England. Twenty-three coaches (8 women, 15 men) aged 22 – 86 participated in narrative interviews that were analysed u…
What Makes Work Meaningful
2017
Abstract Most organizations nowadays have the required resources and should offer an appropriate culture to provide each employee with the opportunity and context to develop the feeling of meaningful work. The managers and organizational leaders should be the first to recognize and perceive the work they do as being important. In this article, we examine the current development of the study of the nature, causes, and consequences of meaningful work, and we offer ideas of research opportunities regarding the interface of organizational perspectives on performing and providing meaningful work.
Teachers’ Work-Related Well-Being in Times of COVID-19: The Effects of Technostress and Online Teaching
2022
Following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the first measures implemented in Italy was the transition from frontal teaching to online teaching. The sudden need to use technologies to perform their job has added a source of stress to teachers’ work: so-called technostress. The difficulties experienced in this transition may also have affected the perception of work-related well-being, although other variables, such as the perception of the meaningfulness of work, could alleviate this sense of uneasiness. The study aims to examine the relationships between technostress, online teaching, pleasure in working, and meaningful work perceptions among 219 teachers from different school …
Professional Agency, Identity, and Emotions While Leaving One’s Work Organization
2015
This study investigated the enactment of professional agency in an emotionally troubled work context emerging from a conflicted relationship between the professional and the work organization. Narrative interviews with Finnish educators were utilized. The findings indicate that the enactment of agency was in part framed by the educators’ rational interpretations of the relationship between themselves and their employer, plus their work history and future prospects. However, it was simultaneously embedded with contradictory emotions, such as a sense of being undervalued, fear, and a sense of empowerment. Within this framework, multifaceted professional agency was enacted particularly via lea…
University as a workplace: searching for meaningful work
2018
Work in academia is changing, and research suggests that not all the changes are desirable. Higher education is developing in a direction heavily criticized, especially in relation to the concepts of neoliberal and academic capitalism. In this article, we explore meaningful work in a university context. Our focus lies on individual lecturers’ positive opportunities to make work meaningful and the university a better place to work for both students and faculty. We examine meaningful work as a relational phenomenon: how meaningfulness is constructed through features such as dialogue, expertise, interaction and sharing of ideas. Our empirical findings are based on analysis of qualitative and q…
Meaningful work, pleasure in working, and the moderating effects of deep acting and COVID-19 on nurses' work
2022
This study aims to verify the association between nurses' perception of the meaningfulness of their work and their pleasure in working, and whether this relationship may change based on the level of deep acting performed to cope with emotional regulation demands and the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on the healthcare work.Nurses from both private and public Italian institutions (N = 239) completed an online questionnaire between June 2021 and January 2022. A moderated moderation model was tested through SPSS Process macro. The design is cross-sectional.The results show that the perception of meaningfulness of work is positively associated with pleasure in working, especially in conditi…
Työn merkityksellisyyden johtaminen: Työn merkitysten ja täyttymysten kyselyn mahdollisuudet ja haasteet
2023
Leadership and meaningful work: The possibilities and challenges of the Vocational Meaning and Fulfillment Survey In this study we examined how leaders perceive meaningful work and if the new Vocational Meaning and Fulfillment Survey (VMFS) could be used as a leadership tool in organizations. The data were collected through 22 semistructured thematic interviews and analyzed with a phenomenographic approach. Three categories of perspectives on meaningful work were found: individual, organizational and holistic. The VMFS was perceived as a useful and practical tool by most of the leaders. It could be used at individual, team, and organizational levels to measure the experience of meaningfulwo…