THE PURSUIT OF MEANINGFUL WORK
IN THE CONTEXT OF CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY:
A SENSEMAKING PERSPECTIVE
Presented by
Josine L. Janssen
2606666 (VU), 11402415 (UvA)
Master Thesis
Research M.Sc. Business in Society
School of Business and Economics VU University Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Faculty of Economics and Business University of Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Supervisor: Dr. Evgenia I. Lysova
Co-reader: Prof. Dr. Svetlana N. Khapova June 30, 2018
We examine how CSR enables meaningful work experiences for employees through an inductive, multiple-case study of two organizations. With this study we contribute to the employee-focused micro-CSR literature by developing a grounded model that illuminates how employees actively make sense of CSR and construct their work meaningfulness in the context of organizational CSR efforts. Using a sensemaking lens, we explore the mechanisms that influence employee interpretations of organizational CSR engagement, and show how these CSR-perceptions shape the meaningfulness of work. Subsequently, we identify enactment behaviors that employees engage in to make their work more meaningful in the context of CSR. Overall, we present a holistic view on the CSR-meaningful work relationship, and the role of agentic behaviors to explain the influence of CSR on employees’ meaningfulness of work.
INTRODUCTION
The call for ‘sustainability’ is increasingly prominent, both in organizational life and in society as a whole. In the context of organizations, we commonly refer to it as corporate social responsibility (CSR), defined as the “context-specific organizational actions and policies that take into account stakeholders’ expectations and the triple bottom line of economic, social and environmental performance” (Aguinis, 2011, p. 855). Most research has focused on CSR at the organizational level, studying objective outcomes such as firm-level performance (Aguinis & Glavas, 2012; Glavas, 2016). Given this strong organizational-level focus, evidence on the effect of CSR on individuals, including how employees evaluate and react to CSR, remains scarce to date. Understanding these processes, however, is significant as organizations continue to implement CSR strategies while the effects of CSR on the workforce remain unclear. Moreover, scholars have called for more studies on CSR at the individual level of analysis – also referred to as micro-CSR (Aguinis & Glavas, 2012; Rupp & Mallory, 2015).
Employee-focused micro-level research on CSR – a field that is relatively nascent but growing exponentially (Gond, Akremi, Swaen & Babu, 2017) – posits that one important way through which CSR can affect employees is their subjective experience of work and, specifically, scholars have widely focused on the topic of work meaningfulness (e.g., Aguinis & Glavas, 2017; Glavas & Kelly, 2014; Pratt, Pradies, & Lepisto, 2013). Meaningfulness of work can be explained as the individuals’ perceptions of their work being purposeful and significant (Pratt & Ashforth, 2003; Rosso, Dekas, & Wrzesniewski, 2010), and is found to be even more important than pay and rewards, working conditions, and opportunities for career
advancement (Cascio, 2003). Considering the increasing importance of work meaningfulness, moral standards and sustainability to the workforce (e.g., Allan, Owens, & Duffy, 2017) as well as to organizations (e.g., Deloitte, 2017; Randstad, 2016), it is particularly relevant to study meaningful work in the light of CSR. Not at the least because living up to the moral claim of being socially responsible goes beyond paying a sufficient wage and assuring physical safety for employees, and includes providing work that is meaningful (Michaelson, Pratt, Grant & Dunn, 2014).
Prior studies on the CSR-meaningful work relationship have confirmed that CSR has the potential to enhance the meaningful work experience (Glavas, 2016). However, the literature remains relatively silent about how exactly employees find work meaningfulness as a result of CSR, a gap that remains due to the lack of qualitative studies on the topic (Glavas, 2016, Gond et al., 2017). We answer to the call for more qualitative research (Gond et al., 2017; Glavas, 2016) and follow prior studies that illuminated the potential of taking a sensemaking lens (e.g., Seivwright & Unsworth, 2016; Aguinis & Glavas, 2017) to answer our research question: How does CSR enable experiences of meaningful work?
Sensemaking can be understood as the process through which people assign meaning to aspects of life, including work (Weick, 1995). Using this lens, we contribute to the micro-CSR literature by identifying the mechanisms through which employees make sense of micro-CSR, and then, how these interpretations of CSR shape work meaningfulness. Additionally, we develop an empirical account on the pro-active behaviors that employees engage in to infuse their work with meaning. With meaning-infusing behaviors, we refer to employees’ behaviors directed at shaping one’s job or work environment, either cognitively or physically, to the end of enhancing the experienced meaningfulness of work.
With this agentic perspective, we move the literature forward in two significant ways. Firstly, prior research on CSR and meaningfulness of work has primarily focused on how the mere awareness of organizational-level CSR contributes to employees’ meaningful work. These studies therefore see employees as passive recipients of meaningful work (e.g., Aguinis & Glavas, 2017; Glavas, 2016). Instead, we suggest that it is important to examine how employees actively make sense of CSR and construct their work meaningfulness in the context of these organizational CSR efforts (e.g., Pratt & Ashforth, 2003; Wrzesniewski et al., 2003). Secondly, prior theorizations of micro-CSR scholars have led to the suggestion that higher levels of meaningfulness could only be a result of embeddedness of CSR in organizations (i.e., CSR being integrated within a firm’s strategy, routines, and operations) (Aguinis & Glavas, 2013; Glavas, 2012), which is only the case in few organizations (Aguinis & Glavas, 2013).
By considering the role of agency in meaningful work creation, we find that employees can in fact experience high levels of meaningful work in organizations that implement non-embedded CSR, as a result of the meaning-infusing behaviors.
In this paper, we build on the findings of a multiple-case, inductive study that uses in-depth interviews as a main source to explore the process through which CSR enables experiences of meaningful work at two organizations. We contribute to the micro-CSR literature by developing a grounded model on how CSR enables meaningful work experiences.
In the remainder of this paper, we first elaborate on the theoretical background of this study. Next, we discuss the findings of our study, and then present the grounded model. Lastly, we discuss the theoretical and practical implications of this study.
THEORETICAL BACKGROUND Microfoundations of Corporate Social Responsibility
In the domain of CSR – defined as “the context-specific organizational actions and policies that take into account stakeholders’ expectations and the triple bottom line of economic, social and environmental performance” (Aguinis, 2011, p. 855) – research has traditionally focused on the organizational level of analysis (Glavas, 2012). The prior literature has focused on topics such as finance, strategy and corporate governance (e.g., Baumann-Pauly, Wickert, Spence, & Scherer, 2013; Doh, Howton, Howton & Siegel, 2010). However, considering that CSR is inherently a multi-level and multi-disciplinary concept (Rupp & Mallory, 2015), scholars increasingly recognize the importance of studying CSR at the individual level of analysis, also referred to as micro-CSR (Glavas, 2016; Gond et al., 2017). Micro-CSR, or the microfoundations of CSR, can be defined as “the study of the effects and experiences of CSR (however it is defined) on individuals (in any stakeholder group) as examined at the individual level.” (Rupp & Mallory, 2015). While in 2012 only 4% of the papers in the domain of CSR took an individual perspective (Glavas, 2012), we observe a growing recognition of the significance of this domain, reflected by an exponential increase in publications in the domain of micro-CSR (Gond et al., 2017), as well as recent special issues on the domain in leading management journals (e.g., Journal of Organizational Behavior, 2013; Personnel Psychology, 2013). Nevertheless, the number of studies is still limited and scholars call for more research that considers this micro-perspective (e.g., Glavas, 2016; Rupp & Mallory, 2015). We position our research in the extending stream of literature that examines
the influence of CSR on employees within the organization (i.e., employee-focused micro-CSR research) (Gond et al., 2017).
Gond and colleagues (2017) reviewed the micro-CSR literature and identified three main directions for micro-CSR research: drivers of CSR, evaluations of CSR and reactions to CSR. Studies on the drivers of CSR focus on the factors that motivate employee engagement in CSR (e.g,. Aguilera, Rupp, Williams, Ganapathi, 2007; Grant, 2007). The majority of the research on micro-CSR, however, studies the reactions to CSR. This stream of literature focuses mostly on the attitudinal, and to a lesser extent, the behavioral outcomes of CSR. Particularly, most studies have focused on positive work place attitudinal outcomes and found positive relationships between CSR and organizational commitment (e.g., Saks, 2006), employee engagement (Glavas & Piderit, 2009) and job pursuit intentions (e.g., Turban & Greening, 1997). Because scholars have focused on well-established OB (i.e., organizational behavior) outcomes, an account of specific CSR-related (behavioral) outcomes is still missing (Gond et al., 2017). Lastly, only a minor part of micro-CSR research focuses on the individual evaluations of CSR, defined by Gond and colleagues (2017) as “the cognitive and affective processes by which people gather and organize information related to organizations’ CSR initiatives to form judgments about the initiatives, experience emotions resulting from their perceptions, and also attribute reasons to their origin”. Moreover, Aguinis and Glavas (2013), suggested that the embeddedness of CSR –defined as “CSR that involves an organization’s core competencies, and integrates CSR within a firm’s strategy, routines, and operations, and therefore, affects all employees” (Aguinis & Glavas, 2013) – plays an important role in employees’ evaluations of CSR, and suggested that embeddedness of CSR influences the perceived meaningfulness of work.
With this paper, we contribute to micro-CSR research and respond to the call for more research on the evaluations of CSR by developing an empirical account of the mechanisms that influence CSR perceptions, and the process through which CSR enhances meaningfulness of work of employees (Gond et al., 2017). Additionally, we contribute to the knowledge on how employees react to CSR, by considering specific CSR-related behavioral reactions that are prompted by these evaluations of CSR. This is important because, following a sensemaking logic (Weick, 1995), it can be expected that these subjective evaluations are an important driver of subsequent behaviors (Gond et al., 2017), and have an even stronger influence on individual reactions to CSR than external and/or objective CSR evaluations (Rupp, Skarlicki, Shao, 2013).
CSR and Meaningful Work from a Sensemaking Perspective
Individuals increasingly aim to fulfill their basic human need for a meaningful existence through work (Rosso et al., 2010; Casey 1995). Broadly speaking, meaningful work reflects individual perceptions of their work as being purposeful and significant (Rosso et al., 2010). This is considered to be in line with the pursuit of eudaimonia-focused, rather than hedonistically-oriented wellbeing (Ryan & Deci, 2001). The two main determinants of meaningful work are rooted in the human need for communion and agency (Bakan, 1966). In the meaningful work literature, this is often referred to as meaningfulness at work (i.e., meaningfulness through a sense of belonging and membership) and meaningfulness in work (i.e., meaningfulness through doing and a sense of impact) (Pratt & Ashforth, 2003). Prior micro-CSR research further suggests that the disconnection between meaningfulness at work and in work can create a lack of congruence and authenticity resulting in less identification of employees with their organization (Aguinis & Glavas, 2013; Glavas & Godwin, 2013). What is more, the increasing interest in the topic of meaningful work from scholars who study organizations can be explained by the fact that meaningful work influences both organizational and individual level aspects of work (Rosso et al., (2010). Examples of outcomes of meaningful work include work motivation (Hackman & Oldham, 1976), organizational identification (Pratt, Rockmann & Kaufmann, 2006), and individual performance (Wrzesnieuwski, 2003).
Research suggests that CSR may contribute to employees' experiences of meaningful work (e.g., Aguinis & Glavas, 2017; Glavas & Kelly, 2014; Pratt, Pradies, & Lepisto, 2013; Rosso et al., 2010). However, a majority of the research on this link takes a theoretical or quantitative approach, leaving a significant opportunity for qualitative explorations on the process of how exactly individuals find meaning in the context of CSR (Aguinis & Glavas, 2012; 2017). We draw on sensemaking literature to understand the process through which work becomes meaningful as a result of CSR. Sensemaking refers to the process through which individuals assign meaning to aspects in life, including work (Weick, 1995), and can be defined as “the constructive practice, which includes how people concerned with identity in the social context of other actors engage ongoing events from which they extract cues and make plausible sense retrospectively while enacting more or less order into those ongoing events” (Weick, 2001, p. 463). By taking a sensemaking perspective, we follow the suggestion that individual perception and pursuit of meaningful work may be best understood as a temporal and ongoing process, characterized by the importance attributed to subjective meanings and interpretations that lead individuals to discover what work means to them (Bailey & Madden, 2017; Pratt &
(Lips-Wiersma & Morris, 2009; Mitra & Buzzanell, 2016), and consider it to be both individually and socially constructed (Rosso et al., 2010). Namely, while what individuals find meaningful is ultimately decided individually, it is influenced by their social context (Wrzesniewski et al., 2003). In an organizational setting, one’s work meaningfulness perceptions are shaped by colleagues (Wrzesniewski et al., 2003), leaders (Podolny, Khurana & Hill-Popper, 2004) and the organization itself (Pratt & Ashforth, 2003). The organizational context provides opportunities for experiences of meaningful work through the interactions within the organization (e.g., colleagues and leaders), but next to that, organizations can enhance the potential of meaningful work experiences by meeting basic moral conditions through their organizational practices and policies (Michaelson et al., 2014), and by making sure that their practices enhance meaningfulness rather than meaninglessness (Bailey & Madden, 2017).
Scholars have proposed that CSR practices can trigger the sensemaking process because it enables employees to contribute to pro-social goals that they care about, and extends the understanding of work to go beyond the boundaries of their specific job and organization (Aguinis & Glavas, 2017). We argue that a sensemaking perspective offers a useful means of exploring the unfolding process whereby people come to interpret CSR and experience their work as meaningful (Weick, 1995). With sensemaking shedding light on retrospective accounts of meaning creation (Weick, 1995), we were able to capture how employees in organizations that implement CSR narrate the emergence of work meaningfulness as they perceive and interpret cues that CSR provides. Additionally, note that the definition of sensemaking as presented above illuminates the fact that individuals enact on the ongoing events as part of the sensemaking process. In our study, we capture this step of the sensemaking process and identify the agentic behaviors through which they enact their work (environment) in the pursuit of meaningful work.
Enactment in the Context of CSR and Meaningful Work
Extant literature has focused on how the awareness of CSR can be a source of meaningfulness. Explaining, for instance, how meaningfulness of work as a result of CSR can be increased due to employees’ perceptions of being part of a firm that serves a higher purpose (Glavas & Kelly, 2014), through the sense of justice that is being done to others (Rupp, Ganapathi, Aguilera, & Williams, 2006), or through positive identification with the firm (Kim, Lee, Lee & Kim, 2010). In other words, a large part of the literature that links CSR and meaningful work builds on the assumption that employees are rather passive recipients of their
CSR environments, instead of considering the ways in which individuals enact those contexts to make their experiences more meaningful (e.g., Aguinis & Glavas, 2017; Glavas & Kelly, 2014). The meaningful work literature, however, is very specific about the fact that individual agency and a sense of meaningfulness through doing are crucial in the creation of meaningful work (Rosso et al., 2010).
From a sensemaking perspective, we would expect that employees reflect on CSR and the meaningfulness of their work, and that these interpretations would function as ‘cues’ for further action (Weick, 2010). This resonates with the idea that “sensemaking involves turning circumstances into a situation that is comprehended explicitly in word and serves as a springboard to action” (Weick, Sutcliff, & Obstfeld, 2005). Specifically, we found that employees engage in enactment behaviors as a reaction to the constraint to the meaningful work experience, as it is produced by the job and/or work environment (Weick, 1988). Enactment then, involves the actions of employees within organizations that “shape structures, constraints and opportunities” (Weick, 1988), either physically or cognitively (Smircich and Stubbart, 1985).
METHODS
Following a multi-case design (Yin, 1994), this research is based on two cases. This enables us to compare insights on the sensemaking process of individuals within different organizational contexts, in order to find an answer to the following research question: How does organizational CSR enable meaningful work for employees? Specifically, in this study, we focus on employees with pro-social motivations, that seek meaningfulness through CSR. Considering the nascent state of the literature, an inductive-type research is considered suitable (Suddaby, 2006). Moreover, we applied a grounded theory approach (Glaser & Strauss, 1967), since we aim to develop theory by illuminating the (social and individually constructed) process through which individuals interpret and make sense of the daily realities in which they participate (Suddaby, 2006), and how they act on these interpretations. Grounded theory enabled us to elevate the data from descriptive observations to a conceptual level, and to develop a grounded model.
Research Setting
a wide spectrum of elderly care. We focus on the health-care sector where employees are found to often feel a ‘calling’ to do their job, meaning that they experience a strong meaningful passion for their work (Dobrow & Tosti-Kharas, 2011) or consider it their purpose in life. For these individuals it is particularly important that work is meaningful, as they pursue a meaningful life through the work they do (Rosso, Dekas, & Wrzesniewski, 2010; Steger & Dik, 2010). The selection of the two specific cases followed from a preliminary investigation, including six expert interviews. Through these contacts we then gained access to several Dutch healthcare institutions. We selected two that are similar enough to be compared based on their products and services, and different enough to be compared on the contextual factors of interest for this study.
Our first case is WellCare1, a privately held healthcare organization that offers a wide range of services to elderly people in the Netherlands, including four elderly homes (with each 100-300 residents) and a nursing-at-home service. The organization, founded in 1933, offers communal living rooms and restaurants to serve both the clients and the neighboring community. With more than 2000 employees (including approximately 600 volunteers) WellCare is the largest organization of our sample. The organization is well known for its outstanding care for clients, both according to the company’s own communication and external sources – they received a place on the list with the 11 organizations in the Netherlands that take outstanding care of the elderly. Furthermore, the organization claims to explicitly consider the well-being of their employees, including extensive opportunities for education. In line with this social image, we reasoned that employees experience high levels of meaningfulness at work. For WellCare, we interviewed 17 employees, from two different locations, and talked to employees from different disciplines (see table 1 for more details). This included the nursing staff, the employees concerned with the day activities and non-medical caretaking and two operational-managers of two departments who are directly involved with the care of the clients. Despite the organizations’ confident communication about employee-care, they struggle with a relatively high turnover rate of 18% in 2017.
Our second case is Plus Care, a smaller sized organization (150 employees, excluding volunteers) that was founded in 1928, and that is currently struggling with a bad reputation due to a decline in service quality in past years. The organization had two locations in the same city, with 70 residents in total. The smaller location (10 residents) was closed a few months ago. The larger location, which we studied, started implementing ‘self-organized’ teams
approximately two years ago as a solution to decreasing quality standards and high employee turnover. However, the transition to self-organized teams was implemented abruptly, leaving the employees to feel lost. Since half a year, a new manager and director have been assigned and successfully managed the employees to feel comfortable with the high-levels of autonomy within this new structure. In line with this, we expected that employees would experience high levels of meaningfulness in work. At this point, employees are confident that the quality of care at Plus Care is steadily improving. Like WellCare, this organization offers elderly homes, and nursing-at-homes services. At Plus Care, we interviewed six employees from different disciplines and a manager.
These organizational profiles offer a unique opportunity to study the process of finding meaningful work in the context of different implementations of CSR. Particularly, the organizational environments of this study provide either opportunities for finding meaningfulness at work or in work, as they are proposed in the literature (e.g., Pratt & Ashforth, 2003). In that sense, this setting provides us with a ‘realistic’ context of organizations that have not embedded CSR (Glavas, 2012).
Data Collection
Our main source of data are semi-structured interviews. We did not seek to interview a representative sample of employees within the cases, but instead to selected a range of employees with a variety of functions and educational backgrounds. However, one requirement was that informants interacted with the beneficiaries of their work (i.e., the clients) as part of their job description. On a separate note, our informants preferred to refer to the clients as residents or clients, but definitely not ‘patients’. For clarity, we will use the term client hereafter. We conducted 25 interviews in two different organizations, in order to gain retrospective and current accounts of participants’ experiences regarding the organization’s social profile and their subjective experience of work (Gioia et al., 2012). All interviews have been recorded and transcribed, and with an average of 45 minutes they provide a rich account of the informants’ lived experiences and perspectives.
Additional to the interviews, we employ other data sources for this study. We conducted nine hours of field observations, six hours at WellCare and three hours at Plus Care. We engaged in non-participant observations both in the communal spaces of the organization (e.g., central hall and cantina) and the (communal) living space of clients where the employees were at work. While the in-depth interviews are our primary source of data, fieldnotes from
TABLE 1
Data Sources and Use
Data Source Number Type of Data Use in the Analysis
Interviews (182 pages single spaced)
30 Preliminary interviews (5) with experts on
HRM and sustainability in the healthcare sector. 2 managers of regional associations for healthcare organizations, 1 board member of healthcare organization, 1 manager from NGO, and a career counselor.
Familiarize with issues in the field that are related to the phenomena of interest for this study, and to select appropriate cases
Focused interviews (25) with medical and
non-medical employees that are involved with providing (health)care to clients. Of which, 3 operational managers.
Investigate processes through which CSR affects
meaningful work and identify resulting agentic behaviors. Observations 9 hours Field notes from non-participant observations
at communal living areas (6 different days).
Written record of social interaction among employees, managers and clients, and activities.
Inform interview questions, provide context to the data, and to ‘triangulate’ the information in interviews.
Informal conversations. Informal talks with
managers, and employees that are engaged with the caretaking. Ranging from brief exchanges to longer and very personal conversations, and panel-like discussions in group setting (the latter is recorded, one-to-one talks are not).
Familiarize with organizational context, building trust from informants, address
unclarities from observations or interviews, or ‘test’ emerging interpretations.
Pictures. Visual documentation of
organizational environment, including written messages from management that appear in the work/living areas.
Provide context to narratives in data about communication from management to employees.
Archival data Annual Reports: Of WellCare (2015-2018).
Including short and long-term strategy reports on client-oriented CSR.
Familiarize with the organizational context and aid interpretation of findings.
Websites: Detailed screening of WellCare and
Plus Care’s website. Illustrate the preferred external (social) image of the organizations.
observations provide context to the narrative of informants and informed our interview protocol. Also, we engaged in analysis of annual reports (2015-2018) and other external communication tools (e.g., websites), to get an account of the organizations’ external communication of their social values (as presented in table 1).
Data Analysis
The initial step of our data analysis included an in-depth analysis of our cases, through the lens of our research question (Eisenhardt, 1989): How does CSR enable experiences of meaningful work? At this point, we did not build our interpretations on existing literature, nor
did we develop a priori hypotheses. Moreover, in this phase of the data analysis we started with the first-order coding, in which we assigned a broad array of codes to the data in wording that resembled the wording of the informants (Gioia et al., 2012). During this search, we specifically looked for instances where people reflected on the subjective experience of their work and the social profile of the organization. In line with the constant comparison method (Glaser, 1965), we embarked on preliminary analysis during the data collection phase, to inform subsequent interviews (Gioia et al., 2012). Well into the first order coding, having become more familiar with the emerging themes, we used tables and graphs to aid the interpretation process and identify relevant theoretical concepts in each organization (Miles & Huberman, 1994).
During this stage of the analysis we also observed that client wellbeing played a central role for the employees, and employees considered the organizations’ engagement in CSR directed at the client more important than other CSR related behaviors. Therefore, we focused our analysis on CSR directed at the client, considering that our data indicate that the perceived CSR directed at clients is what related most strongly with the experienced work meaningfulness.
For the second-order analysis, we aimed to reduce the number of codes through axial coding – looking for differences and similarities among the codes (Gioia et al., 2012) – and merging them into more general categories, informed by the literature on micro-CSR and meaningful work. The aim of this step was to inductively list interpretive themes (Miles & Huberman, 1994), including how individuals find meaning through their work, and the role of the organization’s social behavior and several the agentic behaviors of individuals that facilitated the process of finding meaningful work. This led to the specific meaning-infusing behaviors that emerged from the data and are presented in the findings section of this paper.
We then engaged in cross-case analysis, using the insights from each case to compare across cases, with the aim to observe consistent processes and themes among the cases (Eisenhardt & Graebner, 2007). For example, we found that employees in both organizations engaged in enactment behaviors to the end of infusing work with meaning. Additionally, cross-case analysis enabled us to interpret any differences in findings among the cross-cases, including the role of the organizational CSR on the interpretive themes of interest for this study. Overall, our research process was iterative, moving between data, theory and literature, to refine our findings. This enabled the relevant theoretical grounding in both the literature and our data.
While the in-depth interviews are the main source of data, additional data sources were collected and analyzed. Table 1 provides an overview of all data sources, and how they are used in the analysis.
FINDINGS
We conducted a multiple-case analysis to explore the mechanisms through which employee interpretations of organizational client-oriented CSR shape the meaningfulness of work, particularly for those individuals for whom their job choice has been driven by their greater-good motivations. Additionally, we examine the pro-active behaviors that employees engage in to infuse their work with meaning in the context of CSR. Moreover, we distinguish two dimensions that influence what kind of meaning infusing behaviors employees engage in. The first dimension represents the source of work meaningfulness that employees seek (i.e., meaningfulness at or in work). The second dimension represents whether employees enact current organizational structures, or navigate them, without aiming for any structural organizational changes through their behavior.
In this section we illuminate the iterative sensemaking process, including a reflection and an action phase, to the end of developing a grounded theory model that shows how CSR enhances meaningful work experiences. First, we discuss the reflection phase, that consists of employees making sense of CSR (1st part of findings) and the process through which these interpretations of CSR shape the meaningfulness of work experience (2nd part of findings). Subsequently, we discuss how, in the pursuit of finding both meaningfulness at and in work, these interpretations prompt behaviors aimed at infusing work with meaning (3rd part of findings). These behaviors are presented in a framework that illustrates how individuals are not only passive recipients of meaningful work, but actively contribute to their meaningful experience by engaging in meaning-infusing behaviors.
Making Sense of CSR
Following a sensemaking lens, we explored the employee’s socially and individually constructed evaluations of the organization’s CSR engagement and identified two main mechanisms through which the socially constructed perception of an organization’s CSR is affected: the presence of a visionary leader, and a good reputation. Furthermore, our data indicate two mechanisms that have a significant influence on the individual constructed
perception of CSR: hierarchy and enabling employees to do their work in line with the CSR goals.
Socially Constructed Perceptions of CSR Shaping Work Meaningfulness
Visionary Leadership. The presence of a leader who creates “a general transcendent
ideal that represents shared values” (Kirkpatrick & Locke, 1996: 37), particularly, if these values and ideals were related to the client-oriented CSR goals, had a significant effect on our informants’ CSR evaluations; especially, if this ‘ideal’ was embedded in the organizational goals. Employees expressed the importance of striving for a common goal, and more specifically, towards a goal that they care deeply about. Working for an organization with a clearly communicated prosocial goal, which was also conveyed by the leader, inspired employees to reach this goal together. Also, this sense of shared values throughout the organization enhanced a sense of trust. The quote below shows how an employee’s trust in his leader’s values and knowledge, and the well communicated goals that he cares about, enhanced his sense of belongingness to an organization that is doing the right thing.
“You understand the processes within an organization better if they are developed by someone who has been a nurse herself. You think, oh that is the goal, we are going there together. So, I agree with the goals they set and are working towards. For example, excellent care, that is something to be proud of. Excellent care is a standard of healthcare where really only the best care is being delivered. This means that you need a lot of health-professionals, highly educated. You have to adhere to many requirements. And they are working on that. That makes you think, it is remarkable. Not everybody can manage that.” (Henry, WellCare).
Reputation. Employees’ made sense of organizational CSR through the organization’s
reputation regarding client-oriented CSR. Specifically, a strong reputation enhanced a sense of organizational pride. Also, when others talked positively about the organization, it lifted employees’ confidence and increased employees’ identification with the firm. Contrarily, when people outside the organization expressed their doubts about the client-oriented CSR, employees felt that they were distrusted personally.
“It gives you some self-confidence when WellCare says, for example, our employees and us can deliver outstanding healthcare. Well, if this is its reputation, that somebody says ‘oh you work for WellCare, that is a good organization’, that also gives you a boost personally.” (Lisa, WellCare).
However, the data indicate that a reputation had to mirror the reality that employees experienced within the organization. A discrepancy triggered doubts about the authenticity of the organization’s pro-social claims, as well as doubts about the capability to live up to the set pro-social goals. This was particularly true when the pursuit of these goals was not experienced throughout the organization (i.e., at all layers).
“You don’t have to communicate so much about your social mission, as long as you engage in social activities and show it. It should be visible. Because some organizations write beautiful stories on their website, but in fact do not do anything, in line with the idea that ‘the outside should shimmer’. It would be nice, if you could contribute as an employee. So, it is not that important that an organization is not that strong in communicating what they do, as long as the resident notices it.” (Henry, WellCare)
Individually Constructed Perceptions of CSR Shaping Work Meaningfulness
Hierarchy. It emerged from the data that employees considered themselves the prime
person to judge the quality of the actual health care provided for the residents. Thus, they considered being listened to, and being included in the formulation of client-oriented CSR goals, an important requirement to assure the well-being of clients. Therefore, a gap between the management and employees negatively affected the employee perception of organizational CSR to be a genuine social pursuit.
“I think I would also like to address it and say “I cannot deliver satisfactory health-care”. I am also of the opinion that such an organization does not deserve to have a good reputation. Because eventually I find that, as an employee, you see what the quality of health-care actually is, because those are the people who actually provide the care. So, I think that employees are more of an indicator of good health-care standards than a manager or someone else, someone from the management team or something.” (Lisa, WellCare)
Enabling Employees on the Path to CSR Goals. Our data suggest that, for CSR to be
perceived positively and as authentic, employees have to be provided with the resources and tools, as well as a certain degree of autonomy, to be able to contribute to the explicated CSR-related goals through their work. This was particularly important because employees themselves cared deeply about these goals. In our sample, we found that when the organization did not enable employees to life up to the client-oriented goals, this significantly affected the perception of organizational CSR. Here we provide two examples.
First, the resources made available for the employees to be able to deliver the proclaimed outstanding standard of client care, provide a signal to employees about the authenticity and viability of this claim. For instance, employees felt that insufficient time was being assigned for client-care, for employees to fulfill tasks in line with the proclaimed social standards of the organization. We noted, however, that employees hardly mentioned the effect of the resulting work pressure on themselves, rather, they emphasized their concerns about how insufficient time per client negatively affects the well-being of clients. This can be explained by the fact that exactly the well-being of clients, is what makes CSR valuable to employees.
“There are enough employees that only work part-time. For them it is a race against the clock. They can provide the basic care needs, but, for example cleaning somebody’s nails, those little nice things, or like painting someone’s nails, bringing someone to the hairdresser, you don’t get to those things. Also, with this nice weather, putting the sun screen down, checking whether the tables are clean, that gives so much satisfaction. If you have time for this, you will also hear it back from the family. They will say ‘we really see the difference, the rooms are so clean, and my mom looks taken care of’. This brings back a feeling that we are doing a good thing here.” (Kim, Plus Care).
Secondly, rules and regulations for client well-being – which are often put in place to protect the client and guarantee the high standard health care that the organization proclaims to provide – were oftentimes considered counter-effective by employees. In that sense, the organization did not send the signal of being capable of reassuring the high standards that they claimed to have. Also, for employees it was important that the organization enabled the employees to live up to these standards through their work. However, rules sometimes decreased the sense of autonomy, and when adhering to these rules was time-consuming, employees could not deliver on parts of their job that they thought were more ‘meaningful’ to client-care.
“Of course, it has immediate consequences. As in, the rules are meant to constrain the freedom. And because freedom is constrained, less is possible, of course. And you can give less than you would like to, as a consequence. And sometimes you give less than is actually needed and that can be frustrating at times.” (Erik, WellCare)
Interpretations of CSR Shaping Meaningful Work Experiences
Our data show that employee interpretations of CSR, which emerge as a result of sensemaking, shape the meaningfulness of work. Specifically, we found that CSR has the
potential to enhance both meaningfulness at work (i.e., meaningfulness through membership and a sense of belonging) and meaningfulness in work (i.e., meaningfulness through ‘doing’). In this part of the findings section, we first explain how the socially and individually constructed perceptions of CSR shape meaningfulness at and in work. After that, we discuss how these sources of meaningful work interplay in the context of CSR.
We observed that the socially constructed perception of CSR tends to influence mainly meaningfulness at work experiences. Thus, a strong reputation for client-oriented CSR and a visionary leader enhanced the perception of being part of an organization that ‘does good’. Membership to such an organization enhanced meaningfulness at work. Accordingly, we observed that a socially constructed perception of being part of an organization that is not behaving responsible towards clients, created a sense of meaninglessness.
“Of course, it is nice if you work for an organization with a good reputation. Look, Plus Care’s reputation has declined. Before, it was the residence, you had to go there. People also talked very positively about it in the region. People… they were simply very satisfied. There were long waiting lists. Only, that has changed enormously. They are saying that ‘At Plus Care, things are happening that are not appropriate’ and what not. So, I noticed that, and that Plus Care does no longer have that good reputation. Well, that hurts.” (Trix, Plus Care)
The data suggest that the individually constructed perception of CSR tends to influence meaningfulness in work experiences. This is particularly visible when we consider the hierarchical structure of the organization and whether the organization enables employees to do their work in line with the CSR goals.
, allowing employees to have a positive impact on client well-being, and some autonomy to fulfill their tasks in a satisfactory manner.
“This means that you have too little time for your resident. As a result, you are prone to bungle your work, and then always leave with a dreary feeling. Because you feel like you can never finish your work in a satisfactory manner. And you know, in the back of your head, that the resident might deserve more time, more care, but it is simply not there.” (Henry, WellCare)
Additionally, a more lateral organizational structure enabled meaningfulness in work experiences, as employees felt they had an impact on the formation of CSR goals and standards for client-care.
As explained above, the socially and individually constructed perceptions of CSR function as separate mechanisms in the creation of meaningful work. However, we find that these mechanisms also tend to interact, namely, through the effect they have on meaningfulness at and in work. For instance, we observed that when organizational CSR does enable meaningfulness at work experiences (e.g., outstanding reputation for client-care), while not providing opportunities to find meaningfulness in work (e.g., little autonomy in client-care), the overall sense of meaningfulness tends to be diminished. Thus, a lot of opportunities for either one of the sources of meaningfulness does not simply make work a meaningful experience. Moreover, the data indicate different roles of CSR in the creation of meaningful work. The distinction of CSR as a context and as an action, as presented below, are based on a conceptual development that was presented in a working paper (Lysova & Janssen, 2017), however, we slightly adjusted it to better fit the emerging themes from our data. Below we describe two of these different roles for CSR in the creation of meaningful work.
CSR as a context. In this situation, the individual is part of an organization that engages
in CSR and manages to successfully communicate a sustainable vision and CSR performance with internal, as well as external stakeholders. We find that employees find pride in working for such an organization and identify with the firm as they perceive norms and values (e.g., regarding client care) to align with those of the organization. As explained above, we observe that meaningfulness at work is relatively high in this organization, because employees experience a sense of belongingness to an organization that ‘does good’, but the organizational-level engagement in CSR does not necessarily result in meaningfulness in work for employees. Furthermore, we consider it likely that this is due to the dominance of greater-good motivations in our sample. That is, these employees do not consider it sufficient to merely work for a responsible organization while not being actively involved in the decision-making that shapes the standards for client-oriented CSR and without having a sense of impact on the wellbeing on clients.
“I would like the organization to let itself be heard more. And I also think, WellCare is an organization that you can be proud of, and that you also have to radiate that. That’s also what I would tell everybody, that it is the perfect employer. But, yeah, sometimes I also think, paying a little more attention to its employees and a little more openness, that would … you know, sometimes I have the feeling that you just work, not knowing where the organization is headed.” (Sylvie, WellCare)
CSR as an action. In this situation, the individual experiences high degrees of meaningfulness in work as a result of CSR being part of his or her work role, and relatively low meaningfulness at work due to low meaningfulness stemming from his or her membership in the organization. The latter could be particularly the case for organizations that either do not engage in CSR or, as in one of our cases, the reputation of the organization has been damaged due to past events. Another reason could be that CSR is used as ‘a façade’ for marketing and recruiting purposes. The data show that when the individual doubted the authenticity of the organization’s pro-social claims, this would harm the meaningfulness of their work because they inferred that the organization did not care about the clients like the employee did. Such circumstances prevent the long-run creation of sustainable meaningful work experiences for the individual. Namely, for them to feel comfortable in the organization, they require an organization where the strong values for client-care are shared. Even more, when the CSR intentions of the firm are not perceived as genuine, employees might even consider to be part of a ‘green-washing’ scheme. Thus, not appreciating and realizing work efforts of employees might isolate them and diminish their sense of belongingness to an organization and eventually, even if they experience meaningfulness in work, cause them to leave the organization.
“Well, it is often the case with social work that, if a manager considers social work an important element of elderly care, then you are lucky as a social worker. The current director can actually be pretty blunt about it, saying to me as a social worker ‘what is it that you all day. How does it pay for itself?’.” (Marjet, WellCare)
From the data, it emerged that both meaningfulness at work and in work are sought for by employees in the context for CSR, as it creates more wholesome experiences of meaningful work – also referred to as ‘transcendence’ (Pratt & Ashforth, 2003) – for employees who seek meaning through a specific domain of CSR. The quote below reflects a situation in which employees experience high meaningfulness in work, yet still miss the meaningfulness at work experience.
“For sure, I am happy that I don’t have to mind the clock when I am in doing my work as a social worker and are in conversation with the residents. I can decide the time I spend with them for myself. And I would understand if they would say that I could have a maximum of so many consultations with a resident, but they do not do this. So, I can decide all that for myself. But at the other hand, for all disciplines here in the organization there are nice things organized – last
week there was a staff event for people in the function ‘first responsible nurse'.2 And we are just
the two of us, they never offer us a team-day out. And on the one hand this job is more pleasurable, because of the freedom, but at the other hand, you miss the belongingness to a team.” (Marjet, WellCare)
Figure 1 illustrates the different roles of CSR in the creation of meaningful work: 1) a situation in which high meaningfulness at work exists because of CSR being implemented at the organizational level, but low meaningfulness in work (CSR as a context). 2) A situation in which there is high meaningfulness in work because of individuals being in a CSR-related role, yet low meaningfulness at work is experienced (CSR as an action). 3) The framework marks the situation of an embedded experience of CSR, where CSR enables both meaningfulness at and in work, and lastly, 4) a situation where both types of meaningfulness are not cultivated
FIGURE 1
Visualizing Employee-Interpretations of Organizational CSR Engagement
because organizations do not engage in CSR. Moreover, considering that we are interested in understanding meaningfulness of work of employees who seek meaning through CSR, this last situation is not relevant. Namely, such organizations are likely not to attract sustainability driven individuals in the first place.
We found that employees pursue a state of meaningfulness in which both a sense of belonging and meaningfulness through doing are experienced. However, in our samples the organizations did not provide opportunities for both these sources of meaningful work, and thus, no opportunity to experience an embedded experience of CSR. Given that these opportunities were not provided by the organization, employees were prompted to engage in behaviors to pro-actively contribute to their own work meaningfulness. These meaning-infusing behaviors are explained in the next part of this findings section.
Infusing Work with Meaning in the Context of CSR
This stage of the model is about action-taking, prompted by the cognitive reflection of one’s work meaningfulness. From the data it emerged that employees engage in pro-active behaviors to infuse their work with meaning, specifically, by enacting the elements of the CSR-related work environment that constrains the experience of work meaningfulness. Moreover, employees engaged in pro-active behaviors that shaped their jobs and environment physically, through their choice of social interactions, or cognitively shaped the way they thought about the job and the organization. This resonates with the process that Wrzesniewski & Dutton (2001) call job crafting behaviors, only extends beyond the specific job that can be shaped and includes the work environment that is shaped. In other words, we found that employees engage in pro-active behaviors to enhance the meaningfulness of their work in the context of CSR.
The data show that both meaningfulness at and in work could be experienced, even though employees expressed that the organization and/or the job design did not ‘readily’ provide opportunities for the experience of both sources of meaningfulness. However, by enacting into structures and events related to client-oriented CSR, employees enhanced the potential of experiencing both meaningfulness in and at work.
We identified the behaviors that employees engage in to infuse their work with meaning and found that these could be ordered along two dimensions (see figure 2). Firstly, on the vertical axis, behaviors are ordered by being directed at either infusing work with meaning coming from a sense of belonging and membership (i.e., meaningfulness at work) or meaning from ‘doing’ or a sense of impact (i.e., meaningfulness in work). Secondly, we found that these behaviors were either directed at progressing organizational-level structures, or rather reactive
to organizational structures. While prior research has elaborated on the distinction between meaningfulness at and in work, the latter (orientation of the action-taking), has not. Therefore, we elaborate on the concepts as presented on the horizontal axis of the framework: On one side of the horizontal axis we position ‘progressing the organizational structures’. We refer to the term ‘progressive’ as behavior that is future-oriented and aimed at changing the way things are currently organized within the organization. In that sense, we can say that the behavior is aimed at enacting the structures and events at the organizational level. On the other side of the axis, we position ‘being reactive to organizational structures’. Here, the term ‘reactive’ refers to employees seeking for meaningful work by shaping their job within the boundaries of the current organizational-level elements that might cause the strain on the meaningfulness of work in the first place. Thus, employees accept the status quo and enact their work environment by engaging in behaviors that are oriented at enhancing work meaningfulness within the current structures and events of the organization.
In the rest of this section, we first present the two infusing behaviors that are aimed at enhancing meaningfulness in work (meaningful reactive action and progressive action), and then explain two behaviors that aimed at infusing work with meaningfulness at work (meaningful reactive reasoning and progressive reasoning).
Meaningful Reactive Action. We use the term ‘meaningful reactive action’ to capture
the behavior that individuals engage in to infuse their work with meaningfulness in work. Employees who engage in meaningful reactive action, change the physical boundaries of their work to free the way to have a more significant impact on the well-being of the residents. The individual tends to shape the work so that they have more control and impact, however, do so within the existing boundaries of the organization’s established structures. While not aimed at structural change of the existing CSR-related policies and strategy, the employee might navigate the structure in a way that provides opportunities to exercise control and have a positive impact on client care. To illustrate this, we will discuss two examples of this behavior that emerged from the data.
One such behavior was the tendency to ignore rules and regulations that had been implemented by the organization in line with their client-oriented CSR. Sometimes the reason for ignoring these rules was that the employee felt that adhering to the rule would take too much time; time that is better put to use in the parts of their job that they thought were more significant for the well-being of the client, and thus, more meaningful. Next to that, some rules
FIGURE 2
A Framework of Meaning Infusing Behaviors
were even considered to be ‘counter-effective’, that is, the rule decreased the ability of the employee to take good care of the client.
“Ignoring those rules is not allowed. They want to guarantee this safety of the client. But, well, it is definitely not efficient, because it is at the expense of the time you could spend on other things, time that you desperately need at other moments. So, what you see is that, at times, employees don’t take it too serious. And then actually, yes, try to do it in a ‘creative’ way. Everyone in their own way. But knowing that there are possible consequences to it. In case you are caught ignoring the rules, you will be ‘summoned’ as they call it here.” (Erik, WellCare)
Another example of meaningful reactive action is the pursuit of personal growth. Learning and personal development through education – on various topics related to the job – was considered to enhance one’s individual potential to deliver outstanding care to clients. When employees felt that they did not have the necessary resources to fulfill their tasks in a satisfying manner, investing (personal) time in personal growth and learning was a way to offset the lack of resources provided by the organization, as they believed it made them more knowledgeable and efficient. Ultimately, this enhanced one’s individual potential to have a
positive impact on the well-being of clients, within the existing structure of the organization. Doing so, gave them the feeling that they could be of greater value to the clients, through increased sense of control and impact, resulting in enhanced meaningfulness in work.
“Look, WellCare offers me plenty of study opportunities to grow. If you learn more or study next to your job, then your job gets easier, you get insights into what you are doing, and you learn how to interact with people, clients. These are important points. Otherwise you feel like: what am I doing here? I really grew personally.” (Andre, WellCare)
Meaningful Progressive Action. Similar to the previous concept of meaningful reactive
action, we use the term ‘meaningful progressive action’ to denote the behaviors of individuals to infuse their work with meaningfulness in work. However, instead of shaping one’s tasks within the boundaries of existing organizational structures, meaningful progressive action is aimed at changing the way ‘things are done’. They often have a more lasting result and seem more rooted in the work environment, compared to the ad-hoc reactions to the environment of the ‘reactive action’ behavior. To better illustrate meaningful progressive action we elaborate here on two examples.
Firstly, we found that when employees perceive little room to ‘speak up’ within the organization and do not have an impact on goal-setting and decision making, they sometimes turn to their colleagues. At this level, they can make a contribution to decision-making and impact the goals they care about. This behavior, however, often accompanies an increasing detachment to the organization as a whole.
“If they would listen better to the employees… Sometimes I have the feeling that we are not so important, that we should just do our job. But with your team, you liaise and coordinate of course. Yeah, many ideas have been implemented, how to do things better and more efficiently.” (Janneke, WellCare)
Another example of meaningful progressive action is the focus on feedback of colleagues to improve the CSR-related standards together. In our data, we found that employees sometimes engaged in continuous and collective cycles of feedback, as they felt this enhanced their potential of having a positive impact on the residents’ life and health. This feedback was a source of guidance towards that goal.
“Giving feedback is very important to me. I also feel that they accept a lot from me. That’s also what colleagues say: ‘I rather argue with you than with the family.’ ‘I rather have that you give
me a little kick in the bum than that we receive complaints from the [client’s] family.’” (Trix, Plus Care)
Meaningful Reactive Reasoning. Devoid of a sense of ‘belongingness’ stemming from
membership to the organization, employees might engage in behaviors aimed at building social relationships, or cognitively focus on social relationships that replace the organizational membership as a source of meaningfulness at work. ‘Reactive’ refers to a situation where employees do not enact the specific elements of the work environment that put a constraint on the meaningfulness of their work, but instead, apply ‘work-arounds’ to overcome these constraints. Thus, they enact their work role within the boundaries of current organizational structures. ‘Reasoning’ refers to the behaviors used here, to enhance work with meaning through CSR. Namely, employees psychologically or socially shape their work and work environment to enhance meaningfulness at work. For example, they cognitively shift their focus from finding belongingness and membership at the organizational level, and instead start emphasizing the importance of other groups they are a part of, such as membership to the department or team.
For instance, we found that the need to ‘belong’, and the need for social support, pulled employees towards their colleagues. Employees then experienced meaningfulness at work due the family-like dynamics at work that arose at the team level. Psychologically as well as through the focus of their social interactions, employees redefined boundaries of family and work relationships, or rather ‘blurred’ existing boundaries. This was reflected in the rhetoric, saying for example that, together you are one, and that colleagues are like family.
“Colleagues give me the feeling that I am being heard and that somebody is looking out for you. This does not have to mean that they come to my house or so. No. But here, at work, you need each other. We are like a small family.” (Sylvie, WellCare)
Another example of these work-home fading boundaries can be found in the employee-client relationship. Seeking for meaningfulness at work, they engaged in thinking about and interacting with their clients beyond their job descriptions. It is not surprising that clients can serve as a source of meaningfulness at work, considering that employees from our sample might take care of the same residents for a couple of years, for multiple days a week, eight hours a day.
“All employees also work above their contract hours. And what do you get, you start working even more and become even more invested in your client. Then, you engage in crossing certain boundaries. Even in the weekend, colleagues are sending each other Whatsapp messages [about clients]. Then I think, well hello! You are off today. They lose themselves in the work because they experience severe work pressure, sometimes pushing themselves to the limit to round up their work, because the amount of their tasks and job responsibilities are huge. Even me, as a new nurse, I think: how!? How do you manage? This is why they are too invested in their clients, only think about them and don’t look at themselves.” (Henry, WellCare)
Meaningful Progressive Reasoning. This behavior is aimed at increasing
meaningfulness at work and involves altering the way one thinks about the organization, and change the particular social interactions to engage in, similar to meaningful reactive reasoning. However, progressive reasoning is future-focused, aimed at increased meaningfulness at work by focusing on change of current organizational structures and activities, rather than accepting them. Thus, employees do not direct their focus ‘away’ from the organization in the void of this organization enabling meaningfulness at work, but rather think differently about the organization. Additionally, they pro-actively pursue social interactions with likeminded colleagues.
For example, some employees cognitively shaped how they think about the organization’s CSR performance by focusing on the positively envisioned future. They did so by framing the organization’s performance as ‘growing’ rather than ‘currently unsatisfying’. Thus, instead of cognitively shaping what their jobs mean to them– as is explained in job crafting theory (Wrezniewski & Dutton, 2001) – our data indicate that employees ‘craft’ the way they think about their employer in an equal way. Resulting in organizational membership to be perceived as more meaningful than before engagement in meaningful progressive reasoning.
“Of course, it is important [to be proud of your employer]. You are not going to work for an organization that you are not proud of. Plus Care, yes, a lot has to happen still. But you count on the organization to get back to the standard and reputation that they had before, that is what I go for. That is this ‘plus’ in the logo, so to say, that we have sight upon. We will get there again.” (Jinet, Plus Care)
Also, employees changed the social interactions and engaged with colleagues who shared this rhetoric, were positive about the organization’s future, and willing to work on this together. Accordingly, employees explicate to feel contempt towards (former) colleagues who
did not support the progress, and actively chose to interact less with them as they were harming the sense of unity they were searching for. Moreover, employees pro-actively shape their work experience by changing who they do and do not interact with at work. For a majority of the employees, a sense of oneness – and the according meaningfulness at work – resulted from the feeling that they “were in this together, finding a way out”.
“I see that we have all these new colleagues, good ones. And there were a few who left, of whom I thought, I do not mind you are leaving. Those did not fit here in the organization, trouble makers, negative attitude. Nothing is ever good enough. Then I think, you should leave. You do not fit here then. I think, guys! We are together working on getting back to the historic high standards, catching up, there are new people being hired, so we should give it a chance!” (Kim, Plus Care)
TOWARDS A GROUNDED MODEL
Before we elaborate on the theoretical and practical implications of this study, we discuss the grounded model, and review the cognitive process involved in the development of this model.
In prior sections, we elaborate on the process through which employees find meaningful work in the context of CSR. Using a sensemaking lens to analyze our data helped us to identify and interpret the two different phases of this process. We find that employees reflect on CSR and the meaningfulness of their work, and that these interpretations function as ‘cues’ for further action (Weick, 2010). This resonates with the idea that “sensemaking involves turning circumstances into a situation that is comprehended explicitly in word and serves as a springboard to action” (Weick, Sutcliff, & Obstfeld, 2005).
In the light of our research question and data analysis, we find that in the first phase, employees make sense of CSR and form interpretations of organizational CSR engagement (i.e., CSR as an action or CSR as a context) which shapes meaningfulness of work. In most organizations, that do not embed CSR, these initial reflections on one’s meaningfulness are unsatisfactory for employees who seek for meaning through CSR. This aligns with the suggestion of Aguinis & Glavas (2013), who argue that only if CSR is embedded it enables experiences of meaningfulness in and at work, which are both needed to experience ‘true’ meaningfulness, a state which is also referred to as ‘transcendence’ (Pratt and Ashforth, 2003). Indeed, our findings are in line with these theorization efforts. The employees in our sample with strong greater-good motivations in the domain of client-oriented CSR pursued meaningful
work through ‘doing’ as well as through a sense of membership to an organization that cares equally about clients.
However, while employees provided examples of (permanent) situations at work that harmed their sense of meaningfulness, their ultimate reflections on their subjective work experiences were overall meaningful. This finding stands at the center of our contribution to literature on CSR and meaningful work, as we realized that we could build towards a more complete picture of this process by identifying distinct agentic behaviors that infuse work with meaning, given a lack of organizationally provided opportunities for meaningful work.
In the second phase of the sensemaking process, employees engaged in actions that are prompted by the initial reflections on events or situations. In sensemaking theory, frequent reference is made to ‘enactment’: the process through which individuals shape “structures, constraints and opportunities” (Weick, 1988), and in our case, enhanced the experienced meaningfulness of work. In our grounded model, we elaborate on the meaning-infusing behaviors that employees engage in to find meaningfulness in and at work. Our findings offer a holistic picture of the CSR-meaningful work relationship: Rather than solely considering how organizations can provide opportunities for meaningful work, we engaged in an exploration of the agentic behaviors employees engage in to contribute to that meaningful work experience. In this second stage of the model, we pay attention to the importance of experiencing both meaningfulness at work and in work, and additionally, consider whether enactment behaviors are directed at structural organizational change, or rather aimed at ad-hoc enactment of the work within existing organizational structures.
An important issue is the role of ‘post-hoc sensemaking’ in our data and findings. Namely, an important step in our study was to understand how employees make sense of CSR. Considering that the sensemaking process tends to be triggered by ambiguous situations or events, in the interviews we inquired about the retrospective accounts of employees’ unmet expectations of CSR and how this affected them. The descriptions of CSR might have been influenced by this post-hoc sensemaking of the situation that is being reflected upon. We designed our data collection to enable some triangulation of real-time information of organizational CSR activities, with the retrospective accounts of the employees (Huber, 1985). Note, however, that our findings do not dependent on objective or rational accounts of events, considering that we are interested in the subjective experience and perceptions of employees. The model that we developed is grounded in our data, resulting from iterative rounds of analysis, data collection, and consulting of the extant literature. Also, the process of finding
