Workers’ Definitions of the Characteristics That Comprise Good Work: A Qualitative Analysis

Managers and work design engineers seek to improve productivity while maintaining sustainable and viable organizations. This study provides new information for such practitioners to do that while informing theoretical reflections on what constitutes “good work”. Using an inductive qualitative approach, we describe results of a study of 30 in-depth interviews with full-time workers in the Western United States representing a wide range of occupations. We allow workers to generate their concepts about what constitutes good work and compare this with their reactions to prompts derived from existing research. The three most common job characteristics that workers say are important are (1) positive interactions with people, (2) work that provides social value, and (3) control over work. This study adds to extant quantitative studies of work design characteristics because it provides workers’ spontaneous yet coherent perspectives and demonstrates where those agree or not with prior findings. For example, our study reveals that workers strongly distinguish between two kinds of feedback at work: feedback from impersonal systems (e.g., equipment displays) and feedback from managers and other employees. Our study also finds newly emerging characteristics that have yet to be adequately addressed in assessing “good work”: effective and ethical management, job stability, and mutual trust.