Mapping and measuring leadership practices intended to foster meaningful work

Abstract Experiencing meaningful work is strongly linked to occupational health, and organizational leaders can play a role in facilitating meaningful work through various practices. However, studies identifying and classifying specific leadership practices that foster meaningful work are limited. In this article, we distill and clarify major ways leaders might enable meaningful work and contribute a new tool to assess them. In three studies of employees in various work contexts (N = 689; N = 647, N = 351), we administered a set of items measuring numerous practices leaders use to cultivate meaningful work elicited from a qualitative study of organizational leaders and a literature review. Dimensionality reduction techniques distilled these practices into six distinct domains. We then validated a diagnostic instrument to measure the extent to which leaders engage in each practice (the Practices for Meaning Diagnostic) and explored associations with employee experiences of meaningful work, psychological meaningfulness, and related variables, finding strong relationships. The six identified leadership practices are: communicating the work’s bigger impact, recognizing and nurturing potential, fostering personal connections, discussing values and organizational purpose during hiring, enacting integrity through modeling values-based behaviors, and giving employees freedom. Our results provide a way for leaders to assess practices intended to foster meaningful work and a way for researchers to test the practices’ effectiveness. We also describe contributions to research, theory, and practice.