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Three components of meaningful work

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

Is your work meaningful?

Enjoying meaningful workMeaning (as in “meaning in life” or “meaningful work”) is obviously important. It’s important to a person for its own sake. It also affects other people—for example, it could be a motivational factor, affecting purpose, goals, and behavior. Most adults spend most of their waking hours working, so it’s important for people to find meaningful work, and to find more meaning in the work they’re currently doing.

A few psychologists are taking on the difficult task of using scientific methods to clarify the fuzzy topic of “meaning.” Michael F. Steger has done some research work in this area, and concludes that meaningful work has three, central components:

First, the work we do must make sense; we must know what’s being asked of us and be able to identify the personal or organizational resources we need to do our job.

Second, the work we do must have a point; we must be able to see how the little tasks we engage in build, brick-by-brick if you will, into an important part of the purpose of our company.

Finally, the work that we do must benefit some greater good; we must be able to see how our toil helps others, whether that’s saving the planet, saving a life, or making our co-workers’ jobs easier so that they can go home and really be available for their families and friends.

So, for our work to be meaningful we have to:

1. Understand what to do and how to do it

2. Know how the things we do fit into the larger picture

3. See how that creates a benefit for someone

A case can be made:

[a] that if people learn about the processes within their company or institution, they’re more likely to see how to do their jobs well, how it fits with what other workers are doing, and how the end product creates value, and

[b] that this can lead to a sense of meaning, which in turn makes people better at what they do.

Patrick McKnight and Todd Kashdan, in their theory of “purpose in life,” talk about “meaning” in the larger sense, pointing out that:

“Living in accord with one’s purpose…offers that person a self-sustaining source of meaning through goal pursuit and goal attainment” (p. 242).

A sense of purpose leads you to make goals and then reach them. And you recognize that it has meaning and value. Also,

“Meaning probably drives the development of purpose. Once a purpose becomes developed, purpose drives meaning.” (p. 243).

It works both ways – meaning and purpose feed each other. But probably mostly in the order McKnight and Kashdan identify.

Can this be applied more narrowly to the world of work? Once you know what to do, how it fits into the larger picture, and how that creates benefit, can the meaning you derive help give you a sense of purpose? With that sense of purpose can you then set and attain goals that give you a greater sense of meaning in your work?

“Purpose” has been a key research interest of mine, so I’ll certainly talk about it more in a future post, especially in light of its relationship to “meaning.”

Honorable, meaningful workI can’t help wondering if there are other things that could contribute to meaning in work. Often when you’re good at something, you like doing it more. I would think this could lead to a feeling that “this is what I’m supposed to be doing,” contributing to sense of meaning. Positive emotions are a better foundation than negative ones for broadening and building, and lead to more effectiveness in work.

Norman Augustine, former CEO of Lockheed Martin, presents a similar idea—of these two intertwined factors contributing to meaning in work:

I’ve always wanted to be successful. My definition of being successful is contributing something to the world…and being happy while doing it…. You have to enjoy what you are doing. You won’t be very good if you don’t. And secondly, you have to feel that you are contributing something worthwhile….  If either of these ingredients are absent, there’s probably some lack of meaning in your work.

Then there’s the other intertwined, bi-directional dynamic:

  • Happier, more effective workers developing more of a sense of meaningfulness in their work, and
  • People who feel their work is meaningful becoming happier and more effective.

Michael F. Steger concludes:

A growing body of evidence shows that meaningful workers are happy workers, more committed workers, and, in some tantalizing ways, better workers.

References:

Steger, Michael F. (2009). “Meaningful Work.” The Meaning in Life: Seeking a Life that Matters (Psychology Today blog) June 9, 2009.

McKnight, Patrick E. & Kashdan, Todd B. (2009). “Purpose in Life as a System That Creates and Sustains Health and Well-Being: An Integrative, Testable Theory.” Review of General Psychology. American Psychological Association. September 2009, Vol. 13, No. 3, 242–251.

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly (2008). “Creativity, fulfillment and flow.” TED Talks (Conference on Technology, Education, and Design). October 24, 2008.

Will downloading make you smart and happy?

Wednesday, December 10th, 2008

For some time now, people have been talking about – at some point in the future – downloading information directly to your brain. (Check out the interesting twists on this idea by scientist/inventor Ray Kurzweil and science fiction writer John C. Wright.) Apparently a crude form in the opposite direction is already possible: controlling a computer with your thoughts (See the Berlin Brain-Computer Interface). This means you could control devices that can be controlled by computers, including a computer somewhere on the internet (which means the device could be attached to your body, or halfway around the world).

Related: video of a monkey controlling a robotic arm.

Coming back to the first issue (downloading information), to my knowledge we have to be content for now to download the old-fashioned way. But if you think about it, this just keeps getting better, sometimes by leaps and bounds. Google’s better search algorithm was an obvious advance. Google made it even easier than previous search engines to find exactly what you want, even some very obscure bit of information. We have more knowledge at our fingertips than ever before in history. In that sense we’re smarter than we’ve ever been. It’s a bit of a stretch to compare this to intelligence, but you could say everyone who knows how to search on the Internet has a sort of genius-level knowledge base. I thought about calling this your “Google Quotient,” but I found out the phrase was already being used to mean something else. (I googled it!)

As more complete, better-quality, and more specialized information gets put on the Internet, that knowledge base available to you just keeps improving.

I sometimes read a blog written by Scott Adams, who does the Dilbert cartoon. He’s a smart guy, and often raises interesting issues. A few days ago he mentioned again that he’d been suffering from a mysterious voice problem that baffled his doctors.

I woke up one day thinking my voice problem might be related in some way to my hand problem – a writer’s cramp called focal dystonia. So I Googled “voice dystonia” and up popped a link to a video of a person speaking with exactly the same speech defect I had at the time, something called Spasmodic Dysphonia.

So he was able to use Google to self-diagnose a rare condition, that diagnosis later confirmed by doctors. He tried recommended treatments and therapies, with limited success. Then Google came to the rescue again:

About a year ago I started using Google Alerts to tell me whenever someone mentioned Dilbert, me, or anything about Spasmodic Dysphonia on the Internet. About six months ago I got an alert with a link to an obscure medical publication with a report about an even more obscure surgical procedure for fixing spasmodic dysphonia. I took that information to my doctor, who referred me to an expert at Stanford University, who referred me to an expert surgeon at UCLA. Long story short, the operation I read about wasn’t as promising as the article suggested, but the final surgeon in my travels had his own version of surgery that had a good track record. I tried it, and now my voice is normal. I never would have found that path without Google Alerts.

One way to look at the success of science is that it’s the story of more and more pieces of reliable information being built up so that when you need an answer to a particular problem, it exists. With the development of the Internet, that information is more accessible, which should help more and more problems be solved. Will this make you smarter and happier? Well, if being smart is at least partly the ability to solve problems, the answer is yes, it would help you be smarter. Whether this would make you happier is a little more complicated. Some changes in our lives can make us lastingly happier, but many changes in life situation – even big ones – are easy to get used to. We adapt. New situations that are good, or bad, become normal after awhile. Psychologists call this the “hedonic treadmill.” You’re happy with some new thing you got. But then you get used to it. It becomes the new normal situation for you. And your happiness returns to your normal level.

A method for countering this erosion of your happiness is to renew the positive benefit the good thing provides by actively appreciating it. This goes along with the theme of gratitude I started writing about around Thanksgiving. As you know if you read those articles (Gratitude Visit) (Eight ways gratitude boosts happiness), gratitude can be a powerful support for increased happiness that lasts.

So my thought for the day is that I’m grateful for the development of science and technology (and its public accessibility) that solves problems and creates new possibilities.

Scientific analysis of morality

Thursday, November 13th, 2008

People have asked moral questions about the conduct of science, which has led to things like rules for how experiments should be conducted among other things. And psychologists have studied morality, beginning most notably with Lawrence Kohlberg who studied the structure of moral decision-making and came up with a hierarchical model with six stages of moral development based on reasoning about justice.

Recently psychologists who study happiness have come up with a few things related to morality that are interesting. I talked recently about the analysis of conservative and liberal morality undertaken by positive psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Another psychologist touched on the issue indirectly in a presentation at the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference in 2004. Dan Gilbert of Harvard University is an entertaining and informative speaker and author who recently published the bestseller Stumbling on Happiness, a delightful read in which he explains that we’re not always very good at predicting what is actually going to make us happy.

In the video of the TED conference presentation below, professor Gilbert talks about some aspects of what really makes people happy, including what he calls “synthetic happiness.” A lot of it is up to us. Being in a frame of mind where you are second-guessing an earlier decision is not conducive to happiness; sometimes it’s better for choices to be bounded. On the other hand, the environmental circumstances people find themselves in are not nearly as important as most people assume, because we’re quite good at adapting to both good and bad circumstances. Think about it: so many people make a lot of effort to make money, get a nicer house, car, clothes, furniture, electronic gadgets, etc. And some people strain so much in pursuit of such things that they’re willing to fudge something, to bend the rules – perhaps even enough to regret it later if they’re really honest with themselves. Dr. Gilbert quotes Adam Smith as having expressed a “turgid truth” in his description of pursuing such situations:

“Some of those situations may, no doubt, deserve to be preferred to others; but none of them can deserve to be pursued with that passionate ardour which drives us to violate the rules of either of prudence or of justice, or to corrupt the future tranquility of our minds, either by shame from the remembrance of our own folly, or by remorse from the horror of our own injustice.”

Having that thing you wanted so much is probably not going to make you nearly as happy in the long run as you thought anyway. So if in order to get it you need to cheat or otherwise do something that makes you feel not quite as good about yourself later, why do it? There may be other, even better reasons not to do it, but I thought the fact that Gilbert’s studies and conclusions had shed some light on this reason was interesting.

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