Sinnvolle Arbeit ist identitätsstiftend – Zur Bedeutung der sozialen Identifikation als Wirkmechanismus zwischen Bedeutsamkeit der Aufgabe und Arbeitseinstellungen / Meaningful work contributes to identity development – The role of social identification as a mediator of the task significance- job attitude relation

The past decades of research in work psychology have consistently shown positive relations between meaningful work (here: subjective perceptions of task significance) and employees’ job attitudes. We propose that organizational identification provides a key mechanism explaining the positive link between meaningfulness and job attitudes. In reanalyses of three different data sets, we provide evidence for our hypothesis and show that task significance indirectly relates to job satisfaction, burnout, Organizational Citizenship Behavior, psychosomatic complaints and turnover intentions.