Simone Meskelis

Bringing Meaning to Work through an Integrated Faith

While various organizational practices may enhance meaning in and at work, many people also seek to bring meaning to their work because they perceive work as the primary vehicle through which they express their innermost essence. An individual’s quest for meaning in work is also impacted by their personal faith and/or spiritual orientation. Employees may bring a sense of meaning to their work through a sense of calling which is informed by their personal faith. In this chapter, we explore the role of faith integration as an antecedent to meaningful work. We explored the relationship between integrated faith and the experience of meaningfulness in each of our field studies. The results of those investigations are reported in this chapter.

Enhancing Engagement through the Human Resource Value Chain

The organization’s human resource value chain (HRVC) and its performance management system (PMNG) are important organizational-level drivers of employee engagement. The HRVC consists of an integrated set of human resource management practices – from the sourcing and hiring of talent, through workforce development and engagement, to employee separation – which engages people in a committed pursuit of a chosen strategy and set of core values.

A Comprehensive, Integrative Model of Employee Engagement

The level of employee engagement has important implications for a broad set of organizational outcomes. Therefore, it is important to develop a thorough understanding of the various factors that impact employee engagement. In this chapter, we present an integrative model of the antecedents and consequences of employee engagement. The core relationship in this model is the connection between the experience of work as meaningful and the level of employee engagement. Thus, we consider a variety of micro-level dimensions of organizational behavior that contribute to meaningful work. Our model also includes organizational-level processes such as the HRVC and the PMNG that impact the level of employee engagement. This meso-model provides the basis for the hypotheses that we tested in a series of field studies.

The Road to Engagement

The fundamental premise of our research is that dealing with the resilient nature of low employee engagement requires a comprehensive approach that addresses the problem systematically. We developed and tested such a model in a series of field studies. In Chapters 3–8, we discussed the various subsets of our model. In this chapter, we return to our model and discuss the results holistically. We summarize the implications for practice that emerge from this research. We also recognize the limitations of our research and provide a set of propositions that are intended to provide guidance for future research.

Engagement Across Cultures

The employee engagement problem is not limited to geographic boundaries; low employee engagement is pervasive among organizations around the world. Despite the ubiquitous nature of engagement, individuals’ reactions and responses are often bounded by their worldview and cultural background. These cultural differences have multiple dimensions, including uncertainty avoidance, power distance, and individualism. In this chapter, we evaluate the impact of these cultural differences by examining the results obtained in two very different cultures: Brazil and the United States.

The Meaningfulness–Engagement Connection

The core of our model is the relationship between meaningfulness and engagement. Meaningfulness is a complex subjective experience that includes perceiving positive meaning in work and sensing that the individual’s work makes a positive contribution to some greater good. This sense of meaningfulness is not confined to the workplace; rather, it spills over and contributes to feeling that an employee’s entire life is meaningful. In this chapter, we examine the positive relationship between meaningfulness and engagement in detail.

Creating Meaning in Work through Job Enrichment

Meaningfulness in work involves the work itself and is derived from the actual characteristics of the employee’s job. Meaningfulness in work is achieved primarily through job redesign efforts that create enriched jobs by increasing the variety of tasks an individual does and allowing the employee to see their work as a whole process rather than just an isolated piece of a larger process. Job enrichment also provides increased autonomy for employees. These practices increase the employee’s perception of the significance of their work. Job redesign contributes to meaningfulness by enhancing the individual employee’s fit with their job. In this chapter, we describe the relationship between enriched jobs and the experience of meaningful work.

Creating Meaning at Work through Transformational Leadership

Following the work of Pratt and Ashforth (2003), we distinguish between meaningfulness at work and meaningfulness in work. Meaningfulness at work occurs by being part of an organization that is perceived as significant, rather than focusing on what an individual does. Meaningfulness at work can be enhanced through a variety of organizational practices that provide a sense of meaning by being part of an organization instead of what an individual does. This is done by leaders who build strong organizational cultures. Strong cultures provide a sense of identity that creates a unifying bond among the organization’s members. Leaders can enhance positive meaning by engaging in behaviors associated with transformational leadership to arouse and inspire the members of their organization. In this chapter, we examine the role of these transformational leadership behaviors on an employee’s experience of meaningful work.

Employee Engagement – Why It Matters

Even with the increased recognition of the importance of engagement, the level of employee engagement hovers around 30%. Leaders are now expressing frustration with the lack of specific actionable recommendations for addressing the problem. This book has been written to address this concern by providing a set of specific, evidence-based recommendations for enhancing employee engagement.

Enhancing Engagement Through Effective Performance Management

As a subset of these organizational practices, the performance management system (PMNG) also enhances employee engagement. Performance management involves setting performance expectations through goal-setting and regularly providing employees with feedback about their level of performance. Goals provide employees with a way to evaluate their performance, allowing them to make adjustments as necessary, increase their efforts as required, and ultimately persist until they attain their goals. In effective organizations, these goals are also used as the basis for performance evaluations.