IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/gro/rugfeb/2024005-ob.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Value of Meaningful Work

Author

Listed:
  • van der Meer, Peter
  • Wielers, Rudi

    (University of Groningen)

Abstract

We test the arguments that the extent to which work is meaningful depends strongly on the job, and that it has its own effect on the labour market. We argue that the meaningfulness of the job mainly depends on opportunities for self-realization and on the social value of the work. We test the hypotheses on EWCS 2015 and ISSP 2015. Respondents show a high level of agreement about themeaningfulness of their job. The analysis shows that the meaningfulness is strongly determined by job characteristics related to self-realization. We find that workers in non-commercial organizations find their jobs more meaningful than workers in commercial organizations. There is a trade-off between thewage and the meaningfulness of the work, when we hold constant for self-realization. We conclude that the extent to which work is meaningful strongly depends on the opportunities for self-realization, and is cause for trade-offs between wages and meaningfulness.

Suggested Citation

  • van der Meer, Peter & Wielers, Rudi, 2024. "The Value of Meaningful Work," Research Report 2024005-OB, University of Groningen, FEB Research Institute (FEBRI).
    • Handle: RePEc:gro:rugfeb:2024005-ob
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://hdl.handle.net/11370/d9b05cb7-644f-4299-bd8a-066ae7fc128d
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:gro:rugfeb:2024005-ob. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Hanneke Tamling (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ferugnl.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.