8 SCHWERPUNKT_INTERVIEW PERSONALquarterly 01 / 23 meaningful work as a field of research. The impactful initial work of Amy Wrzesniewski, for example, catapulted calling into the spotlight, but also assessed calling in a way that is more similar to how we assess meaningful work. Thus, efforts by several scholars such as Bryan Dik and Ryan Duffy have looked at preserving the unique elements of calling. To my understanding, the most significant differentiator between calling (which really comes to us from theology) and meaningful work (which comes to us more from sociology and psychology) is that a calling is “called”, that is people with a calling are responding to some sort of summons or call from outside themselves to a particular line of work. PERSONALquarterly: In the meantime, other research methods have been cropping up, e. g., field experiments, laboratory experiments, or daily process methodology. In your Lab (Laboratory for the Study of Meaning and Quality of Life) you make use of different approaches. How would you evaluate or even rate the different methods? What are the key insights from methods beyond questionnaires? Michael F. Steger: Well, my training leads me to suspect that measurement is at the heart of all good research on psychological states and variables. Even in a neurological experiment looking at imaging data, we need to have good measures of what we are studying so that we may reliably link changes in brain activity. So, we need to collectively continue to evolve good surveys and questionnaires. Beyond that, though, the ideal study to my mind would come to us from organizational change and development. Perhaps a company out there would let me collect lots of data on leadership, company culture, and worker characteristics and meaningful work, then implement organizational changes while we track these variables over time. That would be a great study, right? It would allow us to ask whether the organizationwide changes we believe would foster meaningful work actually do so, and whether the big benefits we see in profitability and productivity associated with meaningful work are due to actions taken by organizations or whether the rest in the hands of workers who find meaning no matter what organizations do. I am not aware of too many organizational restructuring studies, if any. We do have some great studies coming fromWilmer Schaufeli and others looking at job crafting efforts and their effects on meaningful work over time. This approach does somewhat put responsibility for meaningful work in the hands of individuals, which still leaves somewhat unanswered the great question of how we would help refashion organizations to broader access to meaningful work. PERSONALquarterly: In your research, you explore meaningfulness beyond meaningful work, especially meaningful living. Many empirical studies show a linkage between meaning in life and at work. Can you describe the linkage between meaningful work and meaning in life? Michael F. Steger: It is hard to typify beyond noting that meaning in life and meaningful work seem mutually supportive. We tried to parse this apart at one point with a study asking: “If you are searching for meaning in life, does it help to find meaning in work?” This was a limited study, assessing how much people were searching for meaning in life and how much they were searching for a calling, then looking at whether actually finding meaning in either life or in work via a calling “answered” that need better. Were people searching for meaning in their lives satisfied by having a calling? Were people searching for a calling satisfied by having meaning in their lives? This was just a snapshot survey, so it could not capture changes in calling or meaning in life, but our statistical analysis suggested that finding meaning in the more day-to-day level of work seemed to do a better job of satisfying the search for meaning in life more broadly than the converse. PERSONALquarterly: Another example for related research is education3. What are your main recommendations for young people entering the labor market or employees reconsidering their career path? Michael F. Steger: Unfortunately, it is my opinion that we have collectively created an economic system that is relentlessly crushing the “human” and “life” elements out of human life, even as each part of it seems too small to make much of an impact. Sometimes it feels like we are little bugs running around a self-assembling doomsday device. In an ideal world, we would recognize the severe and looming risks to human dignity, health, and life on this planet and work together to reshape the economic forces that are risking it all. Unfortunately, it feels a bit more like the larger economic forces are somehow working to reshape our engagement with those risks. So, looking at the work this way, it is potentially troubling to encourage people to prioritize meaning over economic survival. I wish I could give that advice in good conscience, but we do seem to live in a dismal world that prioritizes short-term economic survival above all other values. Thus, I would say that my best advice is to take stock of who you are, your strengths, values, interests, responsibilities, and aspirations, and commit to identifying the best version of each of those elements that can yield an economically viable path forward. Someone who loves the environment and ecology might want to spend additional time identifying whether they have aptitude for law, engineering, chemistry, politics, or information and data analysis. If they do (and I hope they do!) they might be able to find a way to hold to their values and ethics of trying to salvage or environment while doing so from positions of relative power and leverage within the legal, tech, manufacturing, regulatory, government, or think tank sectors. This advice feels like a grievous compromise from what seemed possible even just one 3 Steger/O´Donnell/Morse, 2021
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