Duty, Calling or Passion? The Meaningfulness of Work in Narratives of Public Administration Employees

Abstract

One of the important aspects related to work is the sense of its significance and meaning. In Hackman and Oldham’s model (Job Characteristics Model – JCM), experienced meaningfulness of work is a function of task identity, subjective perception of task significance and the employees’ engaging a variety of skills. Research shows that persons who practice different professions define their work differently and attribute it different meanings. The cognitive and application-related value of these studies is based on a better understanding of the mechanisms of shaping positive attitudes towards work, whose behavioural consequence is employee’s engagement in work. The aim of the paper is to analyse the sense of work meaningfulness among the public administration representatives. In order to explore this issue, qualitative methods, which in principle are applied to discover subjective meanings attributed by individuals to various aspects of reality, were used in the study.

Keywords

• sense of work meaningfulness
• work objective
• professional role
• calling