6 SCHWERPUNKT_INTERVIEW PERSONALquarterly 01 / 23 PERSONALquarterly: If you reflect the current state of research on meaningful work: What are the key insights for companies and employees? Michael F. Steger: The key insights from where meaningful work research lies now are several and begin with the recognition that this area of research is growing extremely fast, with hundreds of new research reports published each year. This means that it is increasingly difficult to keep up with new advances. However, I have not seen anything that would undermine the basic findings so far. The most important insight in my opinion is that people flourish in many ways when they are engaged in meaningful work, across numerous measures of wellbeing, work performance and satisfaction, motivation, and work-life harmony. To me, this suggests that even if business leaders continue to prioritize financial outcomes over others, we can explore ways to help people benefit through their engagement in work. Of course, there is a whole other set of insights that would ideally convince business leaders to truly add other priorities to their key outcomes. Companies that have a greater number of people engaged in meaningful work appear to outperform other companies and enjoy greater retention, motivation, faith in management, and job performance. They also appear to gain brand ambassadors who are happy to talk about their great experience working for their companies. It seems to me that adding up all of these benefits of better work, better wellbeing, lower absenteeism and presenteeism, higher engagement and motivation, better retention and brand ambassadorship, and the implications of some studies for better physical health and better social environments at workplaces, the long-term advantages of fostering meaningful work are tremendous and persuasive. PERSONALquarterly: What are the main drivers for meaningful work on the individual level? How important are personality or more general predetermined traits? Michael F. Steger: Most of the research we have on the drivers of meaningful work come from correlational research, which means we must be very cautious in suggesting any causality. I contributed to a fairly comprehensive review a few years ago, led by Evgenia Lysova at Vrije Universitiet (Lysova et al., 2019) that looked at predictors of meaningful work across individual, job, orMeaningful work Das Interview mit Michael F. Steger führte Heiko Weckmüller ganizational, and societal levels. Almost no studies have included anything like a comprehensive set of predictors across all levels, so it is impossible to extrapolate the relative contribution of a personality trait like conscientiousness versus a society’s tendency toward providing safe working conditions, as one example. But certainly, individual difference variables are important, with fairly consistent links to personality traits extroversion and conscientiousness, with an inverse correlation with neuroticism. Positive affective disposition, or a tendency over time to experience positive emotions frequently and consistently, also is related, as is the recognition and use of character strengths at work. PERSONALquarterly: How can companies contribute to the development of meaningful work? What is the role and the contribution of leadership? Michael F. Steger: Leadership is one of the more consistently studied elements of an organization’s capacity to foster, or undermine, meaningful work. Where leaders act as architects of meaning for their employees, meaningful work is more common. Leaders might do this by communicating the organizational mission (assuming it is not one of those consulting firm concoctions of trendy buzzwords), or through practices that are described variously as transformational, ethical, or empowering leadership approaches. Among the threads that hold these leadership approaches in common is keeping a clear line of sight on what the company is for, who it serves, and the real human beings who are contributing their effort and time to its success. PERSONALquarterly: In this context, what are the core ideas of your concepts of CARMA and SPIRE1? Michael F. Steger: CARMA and SPIRE were initially compiled to call attention to the best research and theory at the time, which would have been about 8 years ago. CARMA was meant to capture what we knew about correlations and predictors of meaningful work that were in the hands of leaders and organizations. Here we would see factors such as authenticity and ethical behavior of leaders, creating workplace relationships on a foundation of enacted respect, clarity of organizational mission and individual 1 Rose/Steger, 2017
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