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Meaningful Work is Healthy Work

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The problem and the solution. This concluding article presents a praxis-based reflection on the applied role of work meaning, its academic research, and the articles presented in this issue. Focusing on issues of convergence and divergence of meaning and the organizational leadership challenges in a global economic and business environment, the article addresses meaning of working issues in human resource development (HRD) and talent management practice. It further explains the role of meaning of working as an important component of professional development in HRD and identifies areas for further research and scholarship.
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The problem and the solution. The article uses three broad historical eras, preindustrial, industrial, and postindustrial, to investigate similarities and differences in the meaning of working in three countries: Germany, South Korea, and the United States of America. Based on the proposition of meaning as created in an interplay between the individual and the social environment, attention is paid to work as a social institution, and the characteristics of work processes, technologies, and organizations are described. The conclusion identifies common and divergent themes and argues for the importance of historical perspectives for the education and training of human resource development practitioners and the utility of a historical and comparative approach to understanding the meaning of working. Directions for further research are offered at the conclusion of the article.
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The problem and the solution. This article situates the topic of the meaning of work and working in the broader context of social science research and theory and develops a rationale for its importance for the theory and practice of human resource development. Some of the themes, anchoring the content of the following articles, are related to issues of levels of analysis in the research on meaning of working; the need for the integration of different disciplinary traditions (historical, sociological, psychological, economic); the dangers of assuming an overly individualistic position on the subject; the role of meaning of working research in understanding the issues of self-identity; and crises of meaning of working arising from unemployment, lay-offs, and growing poverty around the world.
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The article outlines dominant themes in existential thinking and considers what this perspective might offer in developing our understanding of leadership. It explores existential concepts primarily using the writings of Sartre. The existential focus on the concepts of essence and existence is outlined and the current concerns with essentialism discussed in relation to this philosophical approach. The article notes that much research into leadership takes an objectivist approach which, while providing important insights into dimensions of leadership, fails to capture the subjective experience of the leadership relationship. The discussion then details existential themes such as freedom, responsibility and meaninglessness and discusses what questions these provoke for the further study of leadership.
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The purpose of this study was to derive inductively a taxonomy of managerial performance requirements from many empirical studies of manager perfor- mance. Toward that end, 26 dimension sets were first gathered from published and unpublished studies of manager performance. Most of these studies in- volved critical incidents, and all of them were empirically based. lbenty-five industrial psychologists experienced in research on managers then indepen- dently sorted the 187 managerial performance dimensions into categories ac- cording to perceived similarity in content. These sortings were used to construct a pooled 187 times 187 correlation matrix, and the matrix was factor analyzed. The 18-factor solution is offered as an inductively derived, expert judgment-based summary of managerial performance requirements, using data from many manager jobs and numerous organizations. This taxonomy is compared to other dimension sets, and its potential usefulness discussed.
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I have tried to tell you what has seemed to occur in the lives of people with whom I have had the privilege of being in a relationship as they struggled toward becoming themselves. I have endeavored to describe, as accurately as I can, the meanings which seem to be involved in this process of becoming a person. I am sure that I do not see it clearly or completely, since I keep changing in my comprehension and understanding of it. I hope you will accept it as a current and tentative picture, not as something final. One reason for stressing the tentative nature of what I have said is that I wish to make it clear that I amnot saying: “This is what you should become; here is the goal for you.” Rather, I am saying that these are some of the meanings I see in the experiences that my clients and I have shared. Perhaps this picture of the experience of others may illuminate or give more meaning to some of your own experience. I have pointed out that the individual appears to have a strong desire to become himself; that given a favorable psychological climate he drops the defensive masks with which he has faced life, and begins to discover and to experience the stranger who lives behind these masks—the hidden parts of himself. I have pictured some of the attributes of the person who emerges—the tendency, to be more open to all elements of his organic experience; the growth of trust in one's organism as an instrument of sensitive living; the acceptance of the fearsome responsibility of being a unique person; and finally the sense of living in one's life as a participant in a fluid, ongoing process, continually discovering new aspects of one's self in the flow of experience. These are some of the things which seem to me to be involved in becoming a person.
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The concept of employee engagement has garnered attention in both practitioner and academic communities and several approaches for understanding engagement have developed. Whereas many authors have taken their own approach to understanding employee engagement, others have offered reinterpretations of the concept wrapped in well-researched and documented organizational variables. Fortunately, distinct streams of literature have emerged but are widely disparate, surfacing intermittently in the fields of psychology, sociology, management, human resource development (HRD), human resource management, and health care. This lack of continuity is a significant hurdle for HRD professionals being called on to develop innovative solutions to the absence of engagement inside organizations. The purpose of this integrative literature review was to synthesize the current state of scholarly research on employee engagement. As a result, four major approaches emerged, defining the existing state of employee engagement in the academic community. Each approach is explored and interpretations offered. Implications and questions for HRD bring this article to a close.
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In this paper, we present a model of interpersonal sensemaking and describe how this process contributes to the meaning that employees make of their work. The cues employees receive from others in the course of their jobs speak directly to the value ascribed by others to the job, role, and employee. We assert that these cues are crucial inputs in a dynamic process through which employees make meaning of their own jobs, roles, and selves at work. We describe the process through which interpersonal cues and the acts of others inform the meaning of work, and present examples from organizational research to illustrate this process. Interpersonal sensemaking at work as a route to work meaning contributes to theories of job attitudes and meaning of work by elaborating the role of relational cues and interpretive processes in the creation of job, role and self-meaning.