The search for meaningful work: A network analysis of personality and the job characteristics model

Does meaningful work mediate the relationship between empowering leadership and mental health? Evidence from Malaysian SME employees

Introduction

In Malaysia, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) account for more than half of all employment and 98.7% of all businesses. There is little research on empowering behaviors in SMEs, despite leadership empowerment being often practiced. Therefore, the study aims to investigate how empowering leadership affects employees' mental health. The study also reveals meaningful work's role in mediating the relationship between empowering leadership and employees' mental health.

Methods

A stratified random sample approach was used to collect data from 516 employees of Malaysian SMEs. The data was analyzed, and the hypothesis was tested using structural equation modeling (AMOS 21.0) with bootstrap confidence intervals computed to evaluate the mediating effect.

Results

The results demonstrate that empowering leadership significantly improves employees' mental health. Furthermore, the association between empowering leadership and mental health is partially mediated by meaningful work.

Discussion

This study contributes to the present empowering leadership-meaningful work-mental health model for SME employees, which reduces stress and anxiety at the workplace and positively impacts psychological empowerment and their capacity to control their overall emotions in instances of success.

Meaning in life through work: A cognitive-experiential self-theory (CEST) perspective

This article explores existential meaning-making from work using the cognitive-experiential self-theory (CEST). To start with, we use the tenets of CEST to elaborate on how the cues from archetype work environments—a realization facilitating work environment (RfWE) and justification facilitating work environment (JfWE)—are interpreted by information-processing systems to imbue meaning in life (MiL) as internal or external manifestations of coherence, purpose, and significance. Next, we explain how individual differences in work centrality and proactive meaning-crafting ability moderate the impact of JfWE, but not of RfWE, on MiL. Finally, we create a nomological network of existential meaning states emerging from the simultaneous presence or absence of RfWE and JfWE. In summary, by applying the information-processing lens of CEST, we develop an integrated model that explains how work drives MiL, elucidates the resultant existential states, and assesses the role of individual differences in meaning-making.

Plain Language Summary

This article develops an integrated model that outlines how work environments can augur human well-being by fostering a sense of meaning in life (MiL). Based on the cognitive-experiential self-theory (CEST), expounding parallel-competitive processing of information through the working of the experiential and rational system, we explore how the cues from archetype work environments—a realization facilitating work environment (RfWE) and justification facilitating work environment (JfWE)—influence the varied flavors of MiL and meaninglessness in life. We build the argument that RfWE activates the functioning of the experiential system to induce a feeling of internal MiL as internal coherence, internal purpose, and internal value significance. At the same time, JfWE triggers the functioning of the rational system to construct a judgment of external MiL as external coherence, external worthy purpose, and external value significance. However, the interaction between RfWE and JfWE can result in intricate scenarios, including favorable states such as holistic meaning, positive existential feelings, and positive existential narratives. Still, it can also lead individuals into meaninglessness in life through existential fatigue, existential cocoon, or existential futility. Nonetheless, individual differences in work centrality and proactive behavior to craft meaning can act as moderators to alter the intensity of work’s impact on MiL in a JfWE but not in an RfWE.

COVID-19 Disruption and Meaningful Work: The Mediating Role of Family–Work Conflict

Work overload and the alteration in family dynamics caused by the COVID-19 pandemic crisis may be increasing family–work conflict, leading to the consequent decrease in meaningful work. Using the structural equation modeling of covariance, this research determines the impact of the pandemic disruption on meaningful work as mediated through family–work conflict. The sample comes from 534 men and 257 women that are full-time employees of seven public manufacturing companies in Bolivia; they were surveyed by filling out a self-report questionnaire at the companies’ locations. Although no significant direct effects were found between COVID-19 disruption and meaningful work (standardized beta = 0.038, Z = 0.756, p = 0.450), there is an indirect effect when the relationship is measured through the family–work life conflict variable (standardized beta = −0.138, Z = −6.119, p < 0.001). Implications for business management are discussed.

Flexible human resource management systems and employee innovation performance in China – based on the moderated mediation effect

Purpose

This paper aims to explore the impact of flexible human resource management system (FHRMS) on employee innovation performance in Chinese context. The boundary conditions of employability and organizational identity are also discussed.

Design/methodology/approach

This study is based on 322 questionnaire survey from employees in China. The questionnaires were collected at two time points. This study used the method of multi-level linear model analysis for empirical test.

Findings

This study has three conclusions. First, FHRMS have a significant positive impact on employee innovation performance, with employability playing a mediating role. Second, organizational identity plays a moderating role between employability and employee innovation performance. Third, organizational identity moderates the mediating effect of a human source management systems on employee innovation performance through employability.

Originality/value

The results are helpful to open the “black box” of the influence of FHRMS on employees’ individual innovation performance. This study provides a reference for enterprises to establish flexible human source management system to improve employee innovation performance.

Female managers' meaningful work and commitment: organizational contexts and generational differences

Purpose

The aim of this research is to examine the relationships among family-friendly organizational culture, job characteristics, supervisor support, meaningful work, and organizational commitment for female managers. It also investigates generational differences in these relationships.

Design/methodology/approach

Data for the study were analyzed using multi-group structural equation modeling to examine the moderating role of generational differences.

Findings

This study investigates the role of meaningful work as an agent in terms of how it influences organizational commitment for female managers. Empirical results confirm the effect of family-friendly culture on supervisor support and meaningful work, which in turn impacts organizational commitment. The findings also revealed generational differences among Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Millennials in these relationships.

Originality/value

The findings highlight the significance of investigating meaningful work on organizational commitment by examining the relationships with organizational culture, supervisor support, and job characteristics across different generational groups.

Basic Psychological Need Satisfaction, Job Crafting, and Meaningful Work: Network Analysis

To satisfy the psychological needs at work, employees engage in job crafting, which allows them to modify their jobs in meaningful ways. This study extends the research by examining the relationships between variables of job crafting model (i.e., basic psychological need for autonomy, competence and relatedness, perceived opportunities to craft, job crafting, and meaningful work) in a single system network. Participants were 340 Brazilian professionals (mean age 46 years, 61% female). We used network analysis (e.g., partial correlations, shortest paths, centrality measures). The results indicated that psychological needs influenced behavioral crafting and that cognitive crafting served as a mediator of these strategies to meaningful work. Autonomy and perceived opportunities to craft were the shortest paths to meaningful work. Cognitive crafting exerted the strongest influence on meaningful work. The findings suggest that meaningful work is developed through a proactive bottom-up process.

Predicting Construction Workers’ Intentions to Engage in Unsafe Behaviours Using Machine Learning Algorithms and Taxonomy of Personality

Dynamic environmental circumstances can sometimes be incompatible with proactive human intentions of being safe, leading individuals to take unintended risks. Behaviour predictions, as performed in previous studies, are found to involve environmental circumstances as predictors, which might thereby result in biased safety conclusions about individuals’ inner intentions to engage in unsafe behaviours. This research calls attention to relatively less-understood worker intentions and provides a machine learning (ML) approach to help understand workers’ intentions to engage in unsafe behaviours based on the workers’ inner drives, i.e., personality. Personality is consistent across circumstances and allows insight into one’s intentions. To mathematically develop the approach, data on personality and behavioural intentions was collected from 268 workers. Five ML architectures—backpropagation neural network (BP-NN), decision tree, support vector machine, k-nearest neighbours, and multivariate linear regression—were used to capture the predictive relationship. The results showed that BP-NN outperformed other algorithms, yielding minimal prediction loss, and was determined to be the best approach. The approach can generate quantifiable predictions to understand the extent of workers’ inner intentions to engage in unsafe behaviours. Such knowledge is useful for understanding undesirable aspects in different workers in order to recommend suitable preventive strategies for workers with different needs.

Combining Associations Between Emotional Intelligence, Work Motivation, and Organizational Justice With Counterproductive Work Behavior: A Profile Analysis via Multidimensional Scaling (PAMS) Approach

The need for better incorporation of the construct emotional intelligence (EI) into counterproductive work behavior (CWB) research may be achieved via a unified conceptual framework. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to use the Profile Analysis via Multidimensional Scaling (PAMS) approach, and a conceptual framework that unifies motivational process with antecedents and outcomes, to assess differences in EI concerning a variety of constructs: organizational justice, CWB, emotional exhaustion, job satisfaction, and intrinsic motivation. Employing established scales within a framework unifying CWB, intrinsic motivation, EI, organizational justice, and outcome constructs, two EI-based profiles displayed associations with CWB based on responses from 3,293 employees. Both the first core profile, high overall justice and low emotional intelligence, and the second core profile, high emotional intelligence and low work motivation, displayed associations with interpersonal deviance and organizational deviance, as well as emotional exhaustion and job satisfaction. The results are discussed with respect to possible underlying theory and an overarching unified motivation framework that incorporates goal choice, intrinsic motivation, antecedents, and outcomes. We also provide directions for future research and implications for managers in the workplace based on heuristic conceptual frameworks that combine multiple motivational perspectives into a unified model.