Search results

A work system may be said to exhibit social sustainability if it utilizes its human, social, economic, and ecological resources with responsibility. This entails using these resources in a non-exploitive way, regenerating them, and paying due attention to the needs and ambitions of its stakeholders in the short- and long-term. For most presently existing organizations attaining and maintaining sustainability requires a midcourse correction, a transformation process. This chapter reviews the main concepts regarding sustainability and previous research of organizational development in this context. It presents a four-phase model for this transformation process and illustrates the model's application in four different contexts. The results are discussed and directions for further research are presented.

The aim of this paper is to conceptualize employees' sustainable work abilities, or their long‐term adaptive and proactive abilities to work, farewell at work, and contribute through working. Sustainable work is defined as to promote the development in personal resources leading to sustainable work ability.

The conceptual paper distinguishes vital personal resources underlying an employee's sustainable work ability and categorizes these resources with the help of integral theory. Collaborative work crafting was outlined as a tool to promote the development of personal resources and sustainable work ability.

Sustainable work ability depends on personal resources relating to our human nature as both individual and communal beings with both interior and exterior worlds. Work crafting may create sustainable work in which existing personal resources are benefited from, developed further through learning, or translated into novel resources.

When formal job descriptions and preplanned job design do not work in post‐industrial work, traditional job design can be replaced by collaborative work crafting, which allows development in both work and employees.

The paper synthesizes different types of personal resources needed for sustainable working and outlines their development processes, rather than adds one more theory to explain some specific aspect of well‐being, development, and functioning. The paper offers one of the first definitions of sustainable work.

The purpose of the paper is to explore individual and collective workplace learning and the connections between them in the contemporary industrial work.

Two case studies were carried out in the Finnish package‐supplier sector. The research methods applied were standardized observations and qualitative interviews.

The cases show that the socio‐technical influences have created learning‐conductive work at the individual level, but failed to create optimal possibilities for collective learning. The still‐prevailing bureaucratic power relations prevent employees from fully contributing to collective learning and organizational development.

Workplace‐learning research should study more rigorously the connections between individual and collective learning and, especially, the ways in which the prevailing power relations influence them. Integrating concepts from chaordic systems thinking to the workplace‐learning theory seems fruitful and could be pursued further.

In order to become organizations in which internal and external development may take place at the individual and collective levels alike, the case companies should directly address their shared mental models regulating employees' participation opportunities rather than leave those models to develop in a non‐reflected way.

The paper contributes to the field of workplace learning by presenting a conceptual model on sustainable development building on concurrent individual and collective learning. With the help of this model, founded on several theoretical traditions, strengths and weakness in an organization's approach to workplace learning can be detected.

This aim of the paper is to explore regenerative work supporting employees' personal development and, thus, sustainable coping capacity in the post‐bureaucratic transition.

A comprehensive literature review was carried out to build a theoretical framework on regenerative work. Two case studies with an interpretative, action research approach provide empirical examples. Qualitative semi‐structured interviews and participative observations were carried out.

The case studies indicate that the regenerative potential of work is threatened by the unbalanced nature of the post‐bureaucratic transition. Confined bureaucratic work is changing into more complex and boundaryless post‐bureaucratic work. However, organizational practices are still founded on the bureaucratic mentality emphasizing impersonality, pre‐planning, and rigid top‐down use of power. Post‐bureaucratic work realities exist in bureaucratic work organizations; the clashes between the two mentalities lead to human resources consumption rather than their regeneration.

As the paper is founded on only two case studies, further research should be carried out on the inconsistencies between the nature of work and organizational practices regulating work.

The paper outlines alternative post‐bureaucratic approaches to organizing; post‐bureaucratic organizational values and structures are depicted, employees' autonomy and interconnectedness are discussed as the elements of a post‐bureaucratic organization.

It is shown how the post‐bureaucratic transition proceeds in an unbalanced manner such that daily work activities are more influenced by the post‐bureaucratic approach while the solutions for organizing still rely on the bureaucratic mentality. The proposed theoretical model on regenerative work outlines the kind of work experiences leading to employees' sustainable well‐being.

The purpose of this paper is to increase understanding of the ways workers can actively make their own work experiences more meaningful.

The data consist of 29 interviews with people from three professions. The authors analyzed the interviews by coding the statements into first‐ and second‐order categories, and then aggregating them into theoretical constructs; and by recognizing relations between the constructs.

Workers try to increase the proportion of positive cues extracted from work to make their work more meaningful. The three main tactics for increasing the proportion of positive cues are cognitively emphasizing the positive qualities of work, developing competencies to be better able to produce positive outcomes and positive reactions from others, and influencing the work content.

This model provides a preliminary understanding of meaningfulness‐making, based on cross‐sectional interview data. Future research should use alternative methods, and verify and elaborate the findings.

Managers can promote workers’ sense of meaningfulness by coaching and enabling meaningfulness‐making tactics identified in this paper.

This paper presents alternative ways to achieve work meaningfulness that complement the previously recognized job crafting and sensemaking routes.

Jean M. Bartunek is the Robert A. and Evelyn J. Ferris chair and professor of organization studies at Boston College as well as a Fellow (since 1999) and a past president (2001–2002) of the Academy of Management. Her Ph.D. in social and organizational psychology is from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her substantive research interests focus on organizational change, conflict associated with it, and organizational cognition, and her methodological interests center around ways that external researchers can collaborate with insider members of a setting to study the setting. She is an associate editor of the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science and on the editorial boards of multiple other journals. She has published more than 100 journal articles and book chapters and 5 ([co]authored or co-edited) books.