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This study examines the role of psychological safety as an antecedent to meaningful work and as a mediator between transformational leadership (TFL) and meaningful work. Additionally, it explores customer incivility as a precursor to psychological safety and as a moderator in the relationship between psychological safety and meaningful work.

Data from 368 hotel employees in Bangladesh were purposively sampled and analyzed using SmartPLS.

Psychological safety positively predicted meaningful work and served as a mediator in the nexus between TFL and meaningful work. Additionally, customer incivility was identified as a negative predictor of safety and acted as a moderator, reversing the association between psychological safety and meaningful work.

TFL exhibits mixed correlations, being negatively associated with meaningful work but positively linked to psychological safety. Therefore, workplaces should prioritize cultivating a psychologically safe environment and minimizing customer incivility to increase meaningful work.

The results add value to the conservation of resources and self-concept theories by examining the mediating role of psychological safety and the moderating influence of customer incivility from the perspective of hotel employees.

The aim of the study is to identify the ways of making work a calling for employees. Based on signaling theory, the authors present an integrated model to develop calling in employees by finding an indirect effect of meaningful leadership on calling through sustainable human resource management (SHRM) practices. Furthermore, the authors predict that meaningful work will moderate this mediating effect.

In a three-wave time-lagged study, the authors followed 187 workers from multiple organizations across Pakistan to examine how meaningful leadership influences employee calling through SHRM practices in the form of signals. The authors established that this indirect effect is stronger when employees perceive their work as meaningful. The authors used structural equation modeling in MPlus to test a moderated mediational model.

The results show that meaningful leadership is positively related to calling through SHRM practices, and meaningful work significantly moderates this mediating relationship. Specifically, the indirect effect of meaningful leadership is stronger when meaningful work is high.

The study substantiates the high importance of meaningful leadership as a signaler and provides insight into the mechanism of meaningful work as a contingency to develop a calling. The uniqueness of the study lies in testing meaningful leadership empirically and identifying external antecedents of calling among employees.

Meaningful work is gaining importance in the core domains of human resources research. However, there is confusion regarding what constitutes meaningful work and its determinants and outcomes. Earlier studies have conflated conceptual and empirical arguments. Hence, researchers lack clear insights into factors related to employees' experiences of meaningfulness. This study aims to discuss the aforementioned issue.

The authorsconducted a systematic literature review (SLR) of 88 studies (2000–2020) meeting relevant criteria to identify dominant trends and significant gaps in the authors’ understanding of meaningful work.

This review identified six aspects to conceptualize meaningful work. At the same time, the authors highlighted the dominant theory and the instrument used to explain and measure meaningful work. Based on the same, the authors identified different groups of individual and organizational-level determinants and outcomes of finding meaning in work. The analysis also indicates that the comprehension of meaningful work was restricted because most data were obtained from the USA, Europe and certain regions of Asia. During this assessment, the authors observed that several studies emphasized individual-level effects, self-reporting and cross-sectional studies, which restricted the ability to make causal inferences.

This study extends earlier works where the authors stock-take existing research for the past 20 years and build on past trajectories to enrich the authors’ understanding of meaningful work. Unlike earlier works that focused on a specific domain, such as human resource development, this work differentiates by taking an integrated framework-based approach leveraging the antecedents, decisions and outcomes (ADO) and the theories, contexts and method (TCM) framework to consolidate and advance knowledge in the field thoroughly.

The purpose is to present proposals to foster what we call a socially meaningful transparency practice that aims to enhance public understanding of data-based systems through the production of accounts that are relevant and useful to diverse publics, and society more broadly.

The authors’ proposals emerge from reflections on challenges they experienced producing written and visual accounts of specific public sector data-based systems for research purposes. Following Ananny and Crawford's call to see limits to transparency practice as “openings”, the authors put their experience into dialogue with the literature to think about how we might chart a way through the challenges. Based on these reflections, the authors outline seven proposals for fostering socially meaningful transparency.

The authors identify three transparency challenges from their practice: information asymmetry, uncertainty and resourcing. The authors also present seven proposals related to reduction of information asymmetries between organisations and non-commercial external actors, enhanced legal rights to access information, shared decision making about what gets made transparent, making visible social impacts and uncertainties of data-systems, clear and accessible communication, timing of transparency practices and adequate resourcing.

Socially meaningful transparency aims to enhance public understanding of data-based systems. It is therefore a necessary condition not only for informed use of data-based products, but crucially for democratic engagement in the development of datafied societies.

The paper contributes to existing debates on meaningful transparency by arguing for a more social, rather than individual, approach to imagining how to make transparency practice more meaningful. The authors do this through their empirical reflection on our experience of doing transparency, conceptually through our notion of socially meaningful transparency, and practically through our seven proposals.

This study examines the relationship between the use of management controls and the perception of meaningful work. Meaningful work is an important driver of individual performance of managers, and employees and can be enabled by sufficient use of management controls. The purpose of this paper is to address this issue.

Based on bibliometric analyses and a structured literature review of academic research studies from the organizational, management and accounting literature, the authors develop a conceptual model of the relationship between the use of management controls and the perception of meaningful work.

First, the authors propose that the use of formal management controls in a system (i.e. the levers of the control framework) is more powerful than using unrelated formal controls only. Second, they suggest that the interaction of a formal control system together with informal controls working as a control package can even stretch the perception of meaningful work. Third, they argue that the intensity of the control use matters to enhance the perception of meaningful work (inverted u-shaped relationship).

This study presents the first conceptual model of the relationship between the use of management controls and the perception of meaningful work. It provides valuable implications for practice and future research in the field of performance management.

This study aims to examine the moderating role of perceived supervisor support at the team level on the relationships between meaningful work, job embeddedness, and turnover intention at the individual level.

A cross-sectional study was performed in 52 work-units from private general hospitals in Thailand. A total of 719 nurses completed a self-reported questionnaire. The hypotheses were tested through a multilevel approach.

The results indicate that job embeddedness mediates the relationship between meaningful work and intention to quit, and that perceived supervisor support at the team level reduces turnover intention by reinforcing the impact of meaningful work on job embeddedness.

Despite a possible absence of common method variance, social desirability bias may exist due to a single-source survey data. The generalizability of the findings may be limited due to the nature of the sample, which involved only one industry.

Coaching supervisors on management and communication styles and providing team members with a say in concerns and expectations potentially improve how supervisors can be more supportive toward their respective team members.

The novelty of this study lies in its inclusion of meaningful work and a supportive constituent from team supervisors in the mediational pathway of job embeddedness-turnover model by considering a cross-level perspective.

Employee withdrawal behavior can be costly for an organization. Referring to the job demands-resources (JD-R) model, this study assessed employee withdrawal behavior during forced remote work due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Job demands in the recent crisis tend to be high, resulting in the use of job resources, that is, perceived organizational support (POS) during remote work and meaningful work. Thus, the study aimed to examine the roles of POS and meaningful work toward employee withdrawal behavior during forced remote work.

Self-report questionnaires were received from 320 Thai forced remote employees in various industries. Confirmatory factor analysis was conducted, followed by structural equation model to test hypotheses.

The full mediating role of meaningful work between POS during remote work and employee withdrawal behavior was detected, emphasizing its significance as an intrinsic motivator to lessen the likelihood of withdrawal behavior.

Existing knowledge of remote work is questioned in terms of how it applies to a forced remote situation. This study also confirmed the JD-R model in an unfamiliar scenario, contributing to our knowledge of remote work as a future of work.

The COVID-19 pandemic has seen a growing emergence of “quarantine hotels” that provide accommodation to guests who are mandated to self-isolate for 14 days upon entry to a country to prevent the spread of virus. Why are young hotel workers willing to endure relatively poor working conditions and expose themselves to dangerous COVID-19 workplace environments? Perhaps, the opportunity to participate in meaningful work is the prime motivator for hotel workers who choose to work in quarantine hotels. This study aims to investigate the motivations that young hotel employees hold towards working in a potentially dangerous hotel workplace.

Using personal interviews, this research explored the antecedents behind Generation Z employees’ (n = 42) actual behaviour towards working in quarantine hotels through the lens of the extended theory of planned behaviour (TPB) model (attitudes, subjective norms, perceived difficulties and meaningful work).

Results revealed that meaningful work such as making the world safer and going beyond the call of duty was a key motivating factor behind a willingness to work in quarantine hotels. Hotel employees also viewed working in quarantine hotels as exciting but dangerous, and the support from their family nuclei was seen as a key underlying motivator.

The key implications are the image of the hospitality industry in terms of professional identity to be an industry that is respected by society given the high-risk work environment with increased exposure to COVID-19. Even though Generation Z still see some long-standing negatives in hotel work such as long hours and emotional challenge, it is positive to know that there are contexts in which they can have more pride and meaningfulness from their jobs.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper to examine Generation Z hotel workers’ motivations to work in quarantine hotels. A key theoretical contribution to the body of knowledge is the extension of the TPB framework with the additional meaningful work variable.

The purpose of this paper is to explore two research questions: how do people with concurrent substance abuse and mental health disorders (concurrent conditions) experience and describe meaningful activities? And how do meaningful activities influence the recovery process?

This qualitative study uses an explorative and interpretive design in a phenomenological-hermeneutic approach. Transcribed interviews are analysed using a phenomenological-hermeneutic method for researching lived experience. The study was submitted to the Norwegian Center for Research Data where it was approved (Case No. 54661).

Structural analysis resulted in three overarching themes: achieving a positive identity through actions and feeling worthwhile; physically outside but inside the norms of society, and idleness, isolation, and obstacles on the road to recovery. Meaningful activities, considered a cornerstone in the recovery process, vary widely and are primarily described in social contexts, thereby confirming the significance of social aspects of recovery in addition to recovery as an individual journey. The findings also show that experiencing meaningful activities contributes to recovery capital and the development of recovery-promotive identities.

The study consisted of a small sample size, recruited at one location which served as a primary research limitation.

This paper provides insights for health care practitioners and health care decision makers regarding the importance of meaningful activities viewed through a recovery perspective.

Few studies to date have used a comprehensive approach to describe the influence of experiencing meaningful activities on the recovery process.

Human resource development (HRD) research and practice mostly have focused on performance improvement although HRD fundamentally pursues human development as a whole. The purpose of this study is to conceptualize meaningful work in the context of HRD and provide implications for HRD research and practice.

This study reviewed the literature on topics such as meaningful work, the meaning of work, workplace spirituality, the value of work and work as a calling, to understand the concept of meaningful work. In addition, this study reviewed existing studies on meaningful work in HRD journals to investigate the current status of meaningful work research within the field of HRD. This study reviewed the related literature such as meaningful work, the meaning of work, workplace spirituality, the value of work and work as a calling, to understand the concept of meaningful work. In addition, this study reviewed the existing studies on meaningful work in HRD journals to investigate the current status of meaningful work research in HRD.

The findings of this study identified three main themes in conceptualizing meaningful work, namely, positivity; significance and purpose; and human fulfillment. The authors also suggest that the meaningful work discourse in HRD expands a research boundary of HRD and enables a holistic approach to HRD research and practice.

For future research, the authors recommend that HRD research deepens its understanding of meaningful work and its related concepts. They also recommend studies pursuing empirical evidence to reveal the significance of meaningful work.

Given the limited studies on meaningful work in HRD and a lack of understanding of meaningful work, this study proposes a comprehensive understanding of meaningful work, especially within the HRD context. This study also suggests a holistic approach to HRD by stressing a humanistic perspective beyond the performance-oriented HRD.