Amy Wrzesniewski || Finding Your Calling at Work

Doctor Resneski is a professor of organizational behavior at the Yale School of Management. Her research focuses on how people make meaning of their work in difficult contexts, such as stigmatized occupations, virtual work or absence of work, and the experience of work as a job, career, or calling. Her current research involves studying how employees shape their interactions and relationship with others in the workplace to change both their work at any and the meaning of the job. Amy,

thanks so much for chattling with me today. Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to talk with you. Yeah, I've always had trouble saying the word contexts with there am I the only one in the world that is trouble saying that word. I'm sure, sure you can't be sure. I'm sure you can't be It's maybe why we should study one context at a time. Yeah, yeah, oh that's

a good point. Actually. Okay, So look, thank you so much for there's so much to discuss, and I always like to kind of start with the most like sort of general framework leading question. So I was wondering, how you define the word meaning. Oh, that's a great question. And it was this, this question, I believe it or not, though I've been studying meaning for a very long time, was the source of a long conversation I had with the doctoral student yesterday. So it turns out there are

a few different ways to define meaning. So, you know, the way that I think about it has more to do with the nature of the association that someone makes with an entity, and that, you know, I realize even in saying that, how incredibly abstract that sounds, and I almost feel like I need to apologize for that. But the reason that I assign that meaning, if you will, to the word meaning is because the way that this has often been sort of talked about or thought about

in the literature essentially confuses meaningfulness with meaning. So meaningfulness is, you know, the amount of purpose or significance or something like how much you know? Is something freighted with? Right? Is how meaningful is it to you? But the meaning of that thing? You know, what is it that makes it meaningful? Or what is it that makes it not meaningful? Everything has a meaning, and the meaning is essentially the content.

You know, what is the association or what you know, what's sort of attached to a relationship, to a job, to a client, or you know, what have you that dictates for us what the meaning of that entity is. And so I've been very interested in differentiating between these two things. Though it sounds subtle, it's actually not, you know, mean meaningfulness is about sort of how much and meaning

is you know, of what type? You know, our work can be very meaningful to us because it's a way to support our families and educate our children and launch them into the world. Perhaps it might also be that our work is very meaningful, but it is freightd with totally different kinds of meaning that have more to do with, you know, serving the world and what have you. So the difference is between the kinds of meaning people assigned

to their work is really interesting to me. Yeah, so this distinction between meaning and meaningfulness is a new one to me. It's very interesting. It's not very existentialist philosophy of you in the sense that I would say that nothing has any inherent meaning whatsoever, but there really is only that meaningfulness aspect. So I think that is an

interesting perspective. But now I'm thinking of all these examples as you bring up this definition of sure you can have something, you can have a negative meaning, right like and not beneficial meaning to or you know, like like you know, every time you see the name of that ex boyfriend or whatever, it has meaning but it makes you shudder. Yeah, not you in particularly, but just an example that my head. Do you know what I mean? I think I think we all have that x somewhere

back in our industry. But you know, I think that's exactly right. And I think for that reason, you know, part of what I think is powerful about thinking about meaning this way is it's not then necessarily freighted with positive meaning, but it allows us to understand a full spectrum of human experience, right with you know, in my case, with the domain of work, which is where my interest is. But it gives you, i think, more of a line of sight right across the full spectrum of how people

come to think about and experience this domain of their lives. Yeah, and that does make a lot of sense to me. So your research has identified four mean sources of meaning. Would you mind just unpacking those four a little bit? Yeah, I'm happy to so the way that we have, you know, come to think about this, So I should say in the work that I've done, I'm not proposing these as the four sort of sources of meaning of work, but rather,

together with colleagues of mind. So this is Brent Rosso and Catherine Decas, we were very interested in thinking about and understanding what did the literature have to say from you know, back when people first started writing about these questions up to the presence about what the meaning of work is, where the meaning of work comes from, and so on and so in terms of the sources of the meaning of work, that feels important to say because it's not like it's a grand theory that I've proposed

with them, but rather, you know, this is us, you know, almost sort of like we're being the messengers of the literature, Like what what have we had to say as a field or as a set of fields about this. So the first source of that being the self, and you know, how do the selves with the selfs, values, motivations, beliefs and so on, connect with the work in a way

that freates it with particular kinds of meaning. Others in the workplace, so you know, these are coworkers, sort of leaders, managers, the groups and communities that we are a part of sort of through our work, including you know, family. The role of family and informing the kind of meaning we make of our work is something that we're beginning to

understand more about. A third being the work context. And you know, by this this is everything about you know, how is the job that you're doing designed, what's the mission of the organization that you're a part of, you know, what's happening kind of in the national culture around you, and so on kind of where is that work located in, what does it consist of? And then finally in this fourth category is actually i think in some sense very interesting, but it's one that we don't know a ton about,

and that is spirituality and spiritual life. So it turns out that you know, an awful lot of people think about the meaning of their work in spiritual terms. That what they're doing is, you know, in some sense, an offering to a way that they think about their spiritual lives or entities that they believe in. But it's something that organizational scholars and organizational psychologists have by and large really shied away from understanding. But they're potentially really big

opportunities there. Oh, I completely agree. And you know, the spiritual dimension, like Piedmont and some others have found, it, really is a bit orthogonal to the Big Five. It can't be reduced to any of the Big five personality traits. So it's kind of like there is this fundamental need that may manifest itself in religion, but it could also manifest it self in the workplace. So that's a particular topic I'm really interested in. So I'm really glad that

you added that. I mean, it's kind of hard to deny that that's a source of meaning for many people, right, absolutely, yes, And I think you know, if you think about psychology and if you think about organizational behavior, you know, so I sort of sit at the intersection of those, you know, I think it for lack of a better way to put it. I think it can make researchers feel uncomfortable, like, what is this? How do we measure it? How do

we you know, assess this? And so there is work on it, but I think not in proportion to the degree to which this is important to a lot of people who are out there working for sure. You know, I wasn't going to bring this up, but I just thought of it and linkage to that. So I've been

reading a lot of Maslow's writings about the workplace. He spent the summer of nineteen sixty two at this nonlinear dynamic systems company and observed things, and he was really excited by practical applications of his theory of self actualization. But at the time, you know, they had Douglas McGregor had this theory X and Y yes, and the Y is maybe winkaging to your calling, you know, dimension and

we'll talk about. But while he was there, he formulated a theory that like no one talks about or knows about, called theory Z, which I've been trying to expand on, which is all about the spiritual dimension. And he wrote in his journals that summer instincty two about what what theories look like in the workplace. So I'll share that to you. I'm going to share that with you someday. Yes, yeah,

please do please. It's a really exciting stuff, right, Yeah, that's great, And I think it's very little known, right that there's this He kept going up by exactly that's right. Well McGregor stopped at why But it was Maslow that decided to come up with the theory z Yeah yeah, okay, okay, yeah, does that make more sense? Yeah, I feel I feel

less negligent, ye, right, but in not knowing that. But it's interesting, and so he related that to McGregor as opposed to to his own correct work on It's okay interesting well because and then at the very end of his life, like the last couple of years, he positive that self actualation wasn't the top, it was actually self transcendence.

So okay, yeah, this is certainly you know, in this review with Brent Rosso and Catherine Dekas, this is something that we talk about sort of the ways in which work helps and allows us to transcend the self, which is certainly one of the mechanisms that, whether it's implicit or explicit, we see sort of in the literature about how it is people write about the ways in which work becomes meaningful for people. Yeah, you know, the calling,

even the word calling. And you've done a lot of work on distinguishing job career and calling orientations in the workplace. But the whole notion of calling you has religious connotations. Now it's not used, you know, so much to have those connotations. But you know, this seems like the spiritual level of meaning. It feels connected to calling. Yes, I agree, and I think you know, this idea of you know, you're doing the work for something, you know, beyond the

self is core to that. And I think you know, you're absolutely right that originally this was absolutely rooted in

religious tradition and so on. You know, the thought that calling, you know, vocare vocation, calling from God to do and so on, I think has largely become secularized, but it has retained the sense of, you know that it's a deep sort of focus of one's life and so on, often a source of great joy, though not necessarily depending on what side of the literature or on on this, but that always in there is this sense of the work that you're doing being a contribution to the greater

good or to the world, sort of beyond the self, right, And I think there's so much transcendence in that, And it's been so interesting for me to do research, you know, with people who do very different kinds of work, all of whom if they see that work primarily as a calling, they can articulate very clearly exactly how this work has an impact far beyond the self in ways that are

deeply meaningful for them. Yeah, so I want to push back on the notion of beyond the self, and I really want to unpack what that phrase even really means, because like everyone uses that phrase in the literature. Like Bill Damon was on the podcast a little while ago as well, and he's like, purpose must be beyond the self.

I was like, ah, like, let's talk about what that phrase beyond the self means, because you know, the idea of even like Benedict the Anthropologist had this notion that many people are aware of called synergy, where she said the healthiest culture she studied there was no separation between self and the world. So just by being themselves, which was that they were helping the world, and when they helped the world, they actually benefit this self. So those

kind of dichotomies break down. I feel like when we talk about real self actualizing people, that doesn't even make sense, Like self verst world dichotomy. It's one and the same in a sense. So it's not like it's beyond the self. It's that you know, you're helping the world and that's benefiting yourself as well because you happen to be a

good person. Mm hmmm hmm. Some makes sense, I mean, it does, it does, and I think it's a nice point that you're making, and I think an important one because in writing this review, you know that you referenced

sort of around these sources of meaning. One of the things that we found that you know, in reading through all this work and the aggregate was quite frankly sort of dismaying to us, was how much, I mean, part of it is not surprising rights sort of by definition it would have to be this way, but how much of this work was very sort of self referential that you know, things became meaningful because there was something about you know, the self or the self beliefs or the

selfs values or you know, what have you that saw you know, this work in a particular way as opposed to and much less about how does the work sort of connect sort of more broadly to things that are outside of you know, individual belief systems, or individual motivations

or you know, what have you now? And I think we could do a lot better as a field in terms of thinking about and sort of building bridges to doing work in ways that the self in some sense, like you said, you know, sort of disappears, comes to merge right with the other, right, or with the world more broadly in a way that allows people to feel I think fully, you know, more fully integrated. Right. And I guess the way that I see the word in the whole world, well, I'm glad, I'm glad I used it.

So I mean the way I see that. So, you know, I teach a lot of students, and the way I see this as a struggle, you know, for some of them, is this idea of trying to think about work. You know. They all want to go out and do work that they will find meaningful, you know, for a variety of different reasons. And you know, to again sort of connect with a lot of different kinds of meanings depending on

who you know, who it is. But this idea of you know, how do you examine that or how do you interrogate what it means to find sort of work of that nature that, you know. The advice I think as a society that we tend to give people is

look inside, look inside. If that fails, look even deeper inside, look even deeper inside into your hobbies and what you do in your free time and so on, which is a very different way of directing people to think about it then to direct them out right and to have them think about, well, you know, sort of forget yourself for a little while, right, what kinds of you know, opportunities or problems or crises or communities feel like they

are working on something, or working towards something, or trying to accomplish something that to you seems incredibly worthwhile and worth struggling for and worth sacrificing for, which is very much not about focus on the self, right, but though the impact on the self is obviously going to be profound, right of being involved in work like that. Ah yeah, So that's a good distinction between focusing on the self,

which is not the focus, but still the self being. So, as Maslow once said in a quote, the self transcend it self without realizing it. So, you know, so that's what happens with self actualized people. So you know, you get interjected something from the world that resonates with yourself in the deep way. But the point there is that there still is that self concordance, as Ken Sheldon would refer to it. So I've been thinking of, you know, not all we shouldn't encourage people to pick. I would

argue they should choose their calling wisely. Not just having a calling is important, right, it's what is that calling and how does it suit you? Because a lot of people, I feel like, feel pressures to take on causes that they don't actually at a deep self level, really resonate with. And I think that's harmful. That's destructive to the person's

whole being, the totality of they're being. You know, you can see a lot of people growing up with like parents who for instance, make them feel guilty if they don't you know, aren't nice all the time and stuff, and you know, and that's not healthy either, right, right,

I agree. I mean, I think there's a big difference between kind of hitching your wag into a cause because it feels like it's you know, in the abstract sort of a very worthy thing that one could call one's calling versus identifying something or being drawn to something or discovering something right accidentally through work that you're doing that you realize this feels like something I would want to do even if I didn't have to write, if I

didn't have to work, right, And that there's a big difference, right, because you can only you know, even if you're doing work that you feel matters to the world, you know is really important, but doesn't connect with you in that way, it's very hard to sustain, you know, an awful lot of passion and motivation and investment in that work for

you know, for that long a time. Yes, And that's what I love your research and I love you know that seminole paper where you correlate the items with the paragraphs you know whether the three profiles job calling, and then you correlated correlate items, and one of that items was specifically I would continue doing this job even if I wasn't getting paid for it. So they're really inherent in your notion of calling is not just is calling an orientation, but it feels like inherent is the self

concordance or self resonance on the spot. I just said that self resonation. To me, that feels kind of better. That don't tell Ken Sheldon, I said that he might listen to this podcast. He's going to listen in and he's going to know you said it. But I, you know, I think that I think that's right. Yeah, no, I do. And I think that where we discover that can surprise us, right,

So I think there's a big distinction. So a source of sort of ongoing regret, right for me, I would say, is that you know, these three orientations that originally way back now I can't believe it's twenty one years ago, Paul rosen bry Schwartz that in that work, you know, we were really interested in understanding these three different sort of orientations, and you know, going all the way back to that point, you know, twenty one years ago, we

were not in the development of that work. I don't think that any of us necessarily was drawn, you know, toward trying to understand or unpack one of those orientations more than the other two. And in the time sort of since that paper came out and you know, all the other work that's followed, it's been interesting to see sort of how much, you know, calling orientations have really captured the imagination of both researchers in this area but

also the lay public. And you know, it's not surprising, you know why, But I'm sad right that that we don't have as much work or that there's not as much focus on understanding these other meanings of work, because I think you know their meanings in very much the same way that seeing one's work as a calling right is a type of meaning right to attach to the work.

And you know, given how these things seem to be distributed in the population, it's well worth understanding what the experience and nature of these other meanings might be when you see other meanings. Do you mean like self, other person's work on spiritual life? Is that what you meant?

Or you meant job career? I'm meaning job and career. Yeah, I think there's not as much focus on these orientations, and I think can become a little bit you know, almost like caricatures, right in terms of oh, you know, job people are they're just in it for the money and they don't you know, and there's all this sort of stuff kind of put on that that I don't think we have a good research base to claim, right that, like, Oh, these are the people who don't care about their work

and they're just kind of you know, in it, And may be the case, you know, it may also be the case that they would very much like to derive other types of meeting from the work, and what they're left with for a variety of reasons, is seeing it as primarily a financial exchange, you know, with the organization. But that may or may not mean that they care about, you know, doing a good job and that they care about you know, not letting their coworkers down and you know,

things like that. Right, But I think that, you know, if I think about the second half of my career, getting into a position where you know, I and my colleagues can delve more deeply into those orientations feels important. Oh, I absolutely agree, And I'm glad you brought that up. Just returning because Ken Sheldon's self recurrence theory is on

my mind late. He was on the podcast recently and I've been digging into his work and I really like what the one thing I do really like about his work is it distinguishes between the goal contents of your goals and he has found that their particular growth oriented community growth, you know, like I'm growing my capacities are correlated with greater happiness, small being than goals having to do with money, pop reularity. Yes, kind of I would

call insecurity related goals or versus growth goals. I'm trying to map this on to your framework a little bit. And so there is that empirical evidence suggesting that there is a link there between those kinds of goals and lo or well being kind of money in particular. But nevertheless, it is a good point because, like I mean, we're still talking about a large swath of the population. I mean,

if you look at Wall Street. I know, maybe I'm stereotyping, but I mean I can't imagine this not being true if you look at Wall Street, right, I mean, it's

almost like a truism. You know, people are money hungry. Well, although there I mean, so this is the thing that to me is so fascinating right about the meaning of work, is that there are people who work in finance, There are people who work in investment banking who are absolutely as you put it, sort of there for you know, it's a big old paycheck, and you know that that's

the thing that's bringing them back every day. But there are also people we have found in work that we've done who do that same work and they see what it is that they're doing in far more sort of self transcendence, you know, social terms, right, that they are creating value in a way that that is the meaning of it to them, and that the pay and sort of the focus on the pay, you know, certainly is

a part of it. It's not that that's not you know, on their radar at all, but that for them, this feels like it's the activity and what the activity produces in the world that is their primary focus, right. And just as there are people who do that work who they want to become managing director, and then after their managing director, they want to kind of keep moving up that ladder, you know, to have a shot at potentially, you know, running a firm someday, which is much more

akin to a career orientation. So even in that kind of work, there are people who just you know, love the work for the sake of the work itself, sort of see it, you know, almost more akin to play that you know, in the way that they engage with it.

And you know, people who head off and you know, see the work that they're doing, even though others may see it in other terms as sort of being far more pro social and about you know, doing this work in order to have a positive impact on the world in ways that again, you know, they look different from each other even though they're off doing the same job. What it is they actually believe they're doing and why

differs for sure. And you've made that point in your papers that two people in the same exact job, you know, can differ widely in you know, their orientation even within a job. And so I think that's a great point. I wonder what Ken sheldonin Safe is here, because he's kind of made the argument, like the ideal happiness is doing growth oriented things for the right reasons. It's both having the growth orient goals and having autonomous motivation for

its versus a controlled motivation for it. That both in combination, and then you get different gradations of all these things. So he's like, you know, in the middle might be like he might make the case, my gosh, it's funny, I'm trying to like reconstruct what someone might say and

he might not say this at all. Okay, let me phrase it like this, because I don't want to get him in trouble if I'm wrong, but his research, I think suggests that like empirically, choosing jobs that have a focus on money, even if your motivation is growth oriented, yes, is not as conducive to well being as having a job that is day in and day out, the focus is on helping others and you have the autonous motivation. I think he would make that argument, and I would

agree with him entirely. And this is you know, I've been doing some work with Barry Schwartz recently, kind of playing through some ideas. I know, I've been blessed with wonderful co authors and colleagues, and he's you know, primary

sort of among that number. But you know, we've been working through some ideas having to do with the nature of motivation and so on, and thinking about this sort of builds off of ideas in a paper that we wrote a few years ago looking at the nature of the motivations of West Point cadets, of why it as they went to West Point in the first place, and were those motivations more internal to the activity of what it is that you're doing at West Point, which is

becoming an army officer versus were they more instrumental motivations. And you know, what we find is essentially sort of long term field evidence for the over justification effect or the crowding out effect, to show that having different reasons for understanding why it is you're there and is it a focus on sort of an ultimate payoff to you, sort of career wise versus the actual focus of the thing itself and the service right that that represents being

primary to you matters. It matters for who makes it through us point, It matters for how long people stay in the military and their career, and it matters for whether they're elite performers in the first five years of

their mandatory military service following graduation. And I, you know, one of the points that Barry and I have made and continue to develop sort of out of that research is the idea that if you you know, you can imagine job contexts or organizational contexts in which people are confronted constantly by the organization or by their managers, you know, with scripts that essentially tell them that the reason that they're there, or the only reason that they're there is

because they're you know, making money, and that this is about trying to get a bigger bonus, and it's about you know, what their raise is going to be, and you know how well the company is doing financially and so on, and that you know, you could take someone who has you know, say they're focused on growth and they chosen those goals autonomously. You can imagine sort of steeping someone in a context that's you know, drilling home this very different narrative over a long period of time

could be really damaging. Yeah, and so you know, talking soul sucking, right, I mean, because we know right once people have this alternative script in their head that I'm doing this because you know, let's say, like I love my clients I very much. You know, I love sort of helping them and sort of you know, seeing them through the kinds of things that I'm working on them with.

And you know, every time you finish working with a client, let's say you get a paycheck, right if the company is sort of over, the firm is sort of structuring things, so it's all about the paycheck, and we're going to do this with your client set so we can really maximize your own and if you hit this many clients, you're going to get this, you know, this much more money and so on and so forth, that it creates this alternate script, if you will, you know, we're understanding

of why am I working so hard for my clients? Is it because I'm trying to hit you know, en plus two? So I get to this special sort of payoff. Even if it's not salient, it can be made salient by the context you're in. And I think that it's hard to imagine situations in which that's not damaging. I love it. And also I love that West Point paper. I was so excited when I read it. I shared it with my colleague Angela Duckworth and she yes, She's like, oh I was reviewing that. Yeah, and I loved it too.

I hope you I hope I did you know that you knew? She was? Oh, I'm not. I was like, is that an ethical to say that on the Psychology podcast? But she's like, oh, yeah, I loved it. It revealed that to me. Well, it's all good. Yeah, we're both huge fans of that paper. Because you know, Angela, I have a lot of these discussions about how people take her concept of grid and then only focus on the

perseverance part. But leave out the passion part, and that's problematic, you know, you know, the West Point cadets that are doing the best are those that have that combination of both exactly exactly. But also another thing I really really liked about your paper was how you distinguish between consequences and motives. I mean, that's what you were just basically talking about, was that distinction. But there's a quote I

actually pulled out from that paper, which I love. I love the paper so much that I but I'm going to put out my favorite quote, favorit quot from the paper because it segues nicely into the job crafting topic I want to talk about. So, because instrumental consequences cannot be eliminated from human affairs, what the results suggest is that attention should be paid to motives in addition to consequences, and that efforts be made to structure activities so that

some consequences do not become motives. So I think that, yes, and correct me I'm wrong, But it seems like a nice segue into talking about job crafting, because first of all, could you define job crafting? And then maybe how can managers, not just employees themselves do but how can managers kind of help empower the employees to craft the job so they structure actively, so even if they're working in banking. I don't want to be on record here saying, you know,

I don't be a record. You're saying it's bad banking, and I am kind of saying I'm not. It's not that I'm saying that, but I am kind of saying that. But I'm saying, you know, I'm agreeing with you in the sense that no matter what, the job is great because you could have in the nursing profession, you could have a terrible environment, you know, like that's not conducing. So really, I think, you know, we are talking about, you know, collapsing over professions. You know, I do think

there are professional differences. I did make that point already, but I'm saying collapsing over that. There's a higher arching point here, right, Yeah, Yeah, I think so, And I think, you know, so to define job crafting, you know, the way. So this is work that I've done with Jane Dutton and later I love Jane Dutton so much me too.

She's she's absolutely she's such a good human being. Yes, she's I think a role model to us all and so work that I did with her, and then work you know for the work that following up on that with Justin Berg, who's done some really great work in the awesome to hes right he was, he was, And then the work that we've gone with together with Adam that we've done on job crafting. You know that this is, you know, to me, something that is possible sort of

in all kinds of work. And what it is is people's you know, employees sort of acts to change the task or relational or cognitive boundaries of their jobs in ways that for them sort of change the meaning of the work they're doing and their identity in that work. And so that sounds sort of very abstract, but basically what I mean by it is, you know, it's tweaking what it is that you're actually doing in the job

from a task standpoint. So this can be you know, adding new tasks into the work, stripping other tasks out, spending more time or less time on various things that are part of the job, or changing how it is

that you're engaging in those tasks. And likewise, with relationships, it could be seeking out more interaction with people in the whatever department, and fewer interactions with people from say a department that you know isn't as reinforcing of the kind of meaning that you want to make of the work that you're doing, and you know, and or you know, stripping out or building in new or old relationships entirely.

And so that's the second form, and the third form, which sounds more abstract because it's cognitive crafting, is changing how it is that you think about the work that you're doing from the point of view of, you know, is this a collection of tasks or is this somehow an integrated whole in a way that you hadn't necessarily identified, you know before, Right, So you could think of someone who thinks of their job as I come in and I teach three classes, and I have this many meetings

and then I have to do office hours and so on and so forth, versus someone who comes in and thinks about, you know, I'm here to facilitate the learning journey of all of my students in any way that I can. And both people are essentially doing the same thing. And you know where this moves beyond I would say sort of tricks of the mind, or you know, sort of saying like well, you know, one is kind of just telling themselves something different, right, even though they're doing

the same thing. Is that our work suggest they're actually they end up doing different things. You end up focusing on different things. You end up shaping that job in different ways, not just in your head and sort of how it does you think about it, but what it is you're actually doing on the ground. And it's exciting because you know, people do this in jobs even where it's expressly forbidden and they're not allowed to deviate sort of from their job descriptions, they find ways to fly

under the radar and do it anyway. So I think there's something fundamentally human about this. But you can think about managers being in a position to not mandate crafting, right and not like build it into Okay, well are the things that you want to craft in, we're going to make part of your developmental plan, and we're going

to measure you against those objectives next year and so on. Right, there's very little that's autonomous in some sense in that you know, it becomes sort of part of the job description as opposed to helping employees think through how could we support you to make this job more your own right and while you know, meeting the expectations and the needs of the organization. So I also want to be careful.

It can be easy to fall off the other side of the balance beam and think that what we're talking about with job crafting is people just having a free for all work and doing whatever that they want, you know, which isn't what we exactly right, Like you have somebody kind of playing the piano in the in a corner and somebody else, you know, teaching people how to play Texas, hold them or something like this that you know int have done. There much more darker than that now, I'm

curious as to what they would be, you know. The but this idea that you know, people know what it is that they're responsible to the organization for right, and within that you know that this is what the organization needs for me, this is what I'm being paid for. Within that, I think there are often more degrees of freedom than we realize in how it does we do that or what it does we emphasize in how we

do that in ways that have two sort of effects. One, I think it brings people face to face with the fact that they have agency in their working lives. Which you know is often I think a challenge for people and also that they can use that agency in ways that shape the meaning of what it is that they're doing toward you know, something that is potentially more optimal for them. Okay, good, and not just optimal for them, but also potentially optimal for everyone. You have this quote,

might an active this is a question. Quote might an active job crafter spark positive, proactive action among other employees? I love that. I love that question. Have you answered that question yet? So, you know, is crafting contagious? I'm flipping in my head. I just wanted a review with you, Nicho recently of sort of the state of So this has sort of become a literature, which is both thrilling and there's something kind of gobsmacking about that when that happens.

So there are really interesting studies that are being done looking at network effects and sort of relational effects of job crafting. But that's more about what is true of the jobs of the people around you, and in what ways would the structure of those jobs around you either constrain or enable the kind of crafting that you're doing. But I'm not and this is where I worry about I don't trust my memory all the time time sort of for things like this, But I don't know, but

it's possible, it's possible someone's done it. But I you know, I was just going to say it's possible that they do spark, but that the answer that question is yes, yeah, And I'm just trying to think about have I seen a working paper or a recent paper that looks at that I would think yes, I mean I would think that, you know, particularly from the point of view of just social learning, right and seeing oh, this is possible and wow, you know, this person sort of seems maybe more you know,

in tune with the work that they're doing, that you could imagine this moop spreading around. Let's the alternative hypothesis that people have resentment for people like that. They're like, oh, who does Jimmy think he is to job craft himself? Yeah, so have resentment, you know, worry that it's deviance in a negative sense, you know. Feel So One of the really to me sort of very interesting factors that were

variables related to job crafting is interdependence. Right, So if there's someone who's job crafting who's quite interdependent with you, does it kind of almost make your life worse in that you now have to craft to you know, adapt to their crafting. But your crafting is not your own craft Your crafting is reactive to deal with what it is that this person you know has decided in how

it is they're going to do their work. So you could imagine too, you know, the possibility that this could be quite inconvenient for people who work around you if

you're interdependent. Although you know, I think Carrie Leanne at the University of Pittsburgh and her co authors have done studies looking at this was in education, people doing crafting collectively sort of in teams quite effectively, and in fact, you know, some of the effects they find are stronger for people who craft in that way, like where it's almost like a group level process, then you know, do

it sort of individually. I want to talk about some of your more recent work on job crafting and all those things in kind of like non traditional I'm trying to think of the best word to describe non traditional sort of So, what is like virtual work? A lot of people, you know, it's becoming big now, a lot of entrepreneurs or you can work from home, right, So what is the impact of virtual work on job crafting. So this is a great question. So I have data.

So this is a paper that I need to add more data too, because what we have at this point is a really interesting pattern that we've presented at conferences and so on. But in data that I collected with Caroline Bartel and Botia Weisenfeld, we look at people who people's job crafting as a function of sort of the

structural variable of actually two structural variables. One are you a manager or are you a non manager as a way of thinking about the kinds of power and control that people might have over their ability right to shape their jobs in ways that they might want. And then

we also look at do you work virtually or not? Right, So, in organizations where there's more of a range than ever I would think in how much sort of virtual work is being deployed where people are either working from home or from drop in centers or you know, what have you. What we find is that managers craft just as much whether they are working primarily on site or off site.

Right that being more or less virtual doesn't really make a difference in how much managers are crafting, which might say something about how you know the power or the autonomy that you have to craft matters sort of quite a bit. What we find though, is that for employees who are non managerial, the more virtual they are, the more they craft. They look more like managers when they

are engaging in more virtual work. And the people who craft the least are the non managerial employees who work on site in the organization who don't do virtual work. And so it's an interesting sort of twist on understanding, you know, how structural variables might end up, you know, unleashing or enabling people to you know, engage in or enact their work in different ways. That is really cool. Did you just wake up one morning you're like, I want to study that topic, like how they be get

to that. So, you know, in your very kind introduction of me, you know, you mentioned how I'm interested in how people derive meeting from their work and in particular

how they do that in difficult contexts. And so this study sort of came out of an opportunity with actually one of my very best friends in the world from grad school who had gone into an organization as opposed to into academia, and we were trying to figure out, you know, a project that we could do together, but our research interests were in very different areas, and when it occurred to me that they were really you know, interested in questions of people who are working virtually in

that organization, For me, that really just stood out as a context in which the way in which people sort of make meaning of the work that they do might be particularly difficult or challenging because in some sense, like the organization, though it's there, you know, the physical manifestation of that organization is not. And so what's the impact of that on how people think about, or enact or try to bring meaning sort of into their work. And so,

you know, crafting is a way that people do. That became an interesting sort of vehicle right through which to look at that. And so it was an opportunity to look at a contextual variable that's sort of structural in a sense around how people do their work that I thought sort of might you know, might create sort of some challenge for people that I wanted to do a better job of understanding. Yeah, that seems like a natural transition, so to speak, which actually is segue into my nerdor court,

which is how are meaning shape job transitions? You know, like like are our careers versus calling orientations, how does that shape our job transitions? That it's a great question. So that this, you know, again sort of is a context where you know, people are you know, people go through depending on what statistics you subscribe to and believe people will go through anything from like you know, nine

to eleven, you know, job changes in their career. And again obviously there are huge changes across you know, different occupations and parts of the economy and so on. But again in earlier work that I had done, and this is work that's sort of morphed sort of since that time into a different focus looking at employment transitions, We've been interested in thinking about how does the kind of meaning people make of the work they usually do change

what it means to transition between jobs. And so you know, you could imagine for someone who sees the work that they do primarily as a job, where it's about, you know, an economic exchange with an organization to make an income

to support your life outside of work. For someone in that position, you know, leaving a job or losing a job, you know, the challenge that that represents to you is replacing an income stream primarily right versus let's say, let's contrast that, right with someone who sees the work that

they do as a calling. A decision to leave a job or or you know, being let go from a job presents a very different kind of challenge where it's not just that you need to you know, people with callings need to eat too, right, they need to replace an income stream. But even more salient to them, I would argue, is the idea that they need to find work that enables them to enact the you know, the kind of thing that they've identified, you know, is feeding

sort of their sense of calling. Right. So you know, that could be as specific as you know, I work on this particular kind of cancer drug and that's you know, my life, or it could be something even more general, like my calling is to teach, and so you know, there's some flexibility in that in terms of how that happens or with what audience or you know, what have you. But that it matters very much what the content of the work is in ways that it wouldn't necessarily for

people who see their work as well. See I would say that's selfish of them. And when I say that, I mean that in a good way. See, there's healthy selfishness. That's what these people have, you know, like their healthy selfishness is what automatically benefits the world, is what Masaw would say, and what I this is why again this beyond the self idea as well as this notion that selfishness is always bad is also incorrect, you know, yeah, because one could say that's pretty selfish of them meant

to do that. They're like, no, I'm not gonna do that job because it's not calling me, you know what I mean, it's like no selfishness. But it's a good form. It's a good form. It's a good form of selfishness, a good form. It's a good form. I absolutely agree.

And so what we find is, you know that people, the amount of time it takes people to find a job, the kinds of jobs they find sort of you know, vary by these orientations in ways that that would make sense sort of out of these arguments, which is, you know, again,

it's fun. I enjoy very much sort of asking questions about, Okay, where should these things matter, you know, and sometimes we have a good of how they might and other times it's really you know, less clear to then go investigate and learn more about you know, how do these different meanings of work end up having an impact in people's lives beyond what we've understood previously. Yeah, the way you've talked about that is sometimes you say this is an

alternative framework to how it's traditionally been studied in literature. This, you know, how dare you look at the interaction between self and world? Right? Yes, and relationships between contingent variables. So that's very cool. I have one last question on respective of your time today, but I found this another very interesting aspect of your more recent research, and that's

occupational regret and it's consequences for work in life. A lot of us, may you know, occupation regret I feel like might be very prevalent, and maybe it's a matter of framing, cognitive framing. What do you think it could be? I mean, I possibly, Yeah, I mean I think that. So this paper, it's funny. One of my co authors on this paper is Jennifer Toasty Karas. We were just writing emailing yesterday about this paper because this is the

paper that the little engine that could in that. Yeah, it's you know one of the some of the papers I'm proud of STUF are ones that I worked on for you know, it feel like lifetimes, and this is certainly one of them, because we keep sort of adding studies to this paper, and so the paper's getting better all the time, and you know, someday before I retire, it will be published and come out that you know, in the paper we're very interested in this question of

and actually, you know, to be honest, the impetus for this paper goes all the way back to when I was an undergrad at Penn working with Paul and Rick and Barry on this paper that became the Jobs, Careers and Collinges paper. Because one of the items in the scale that we did, the measure that we developed, was something like, if I had it to do over again, I would choose my current work life again or I

would chose my current work again. And for me, what was odd about that item and sort of really problematic, though you know, all of this is a negotiation and we decided to include it and so on and it you know, it gets nice variants and stuff, is that it doesn't make sense as an item if you never

chose what you were doing in the first place. And I felt like, well, there are whole you know, enormous right, numbers of people who land in the work that they're doing not because they chose it, but because this was they had to do something, this was available, and so they did it. And so yes, they chose it, meaning you know, no one sort of forced them to fill out in the application or to interview for the job. They chose it, but they don't, you know, they don't

feel like it was a free choice. They felt like they landed there right out of you know, circumstance or out of others pressure or you know, something like this.

And so that got me interested in thinking about, well, what about those people, because that item doesn't really speak for them or speak to them, And how do we understand people who you know, maybe went into an occupation back when there were fewer options available to them, And might that shape you know, whether they see their work as a job or a career or a calling and

you know, I what the ideal thing would be. And my goodness, from that amount of time ago to now, I could have done the prospective longitudinal study involved people for twenty years. Is what I first sort of was interested in doing is sort of getting a sense of what was their sense of how much choice they had in entering this occupation and you know how much agency they had in that choice, you know, to relate that to how do they see the meaning of that work.

And it's been a really interesting journey sort of with this paper because we find that you know, certainly the sense that you know, this isn't this isn't the thing that you would have done, you know, had you had you know, your druthers or more choice available to you, that this really does have a big relationship with sort

of see the work that you're doing. So a relationship between the sense of occupational regret and you know, and how much choice you felt like you really had in entering that occupation, and that this matters for people's well being. It matters for their job satisfaction and their life satisfaction, It matters for how much work, you know, how many

days of work they miss. Like there are a lot of interesting mediating relationships in this data to suggest that, you know, occupational regret is pretty consequential, right if if you're getting up every day, you know, setting your alarm and getting up every day and heading off to a job, that you would undo this if you could, you know, but you haven't, or you can't. You know, we know from the broader regret literature that these kinds of things

can be profound. And you know, given that you know, educational regrets are among you know, work related regrets are quite high up in people's sort of life regret lists,

but some are educational regrets. And I would argue that the two are probably related, right that if you had to stop your education, or didn't have access to education, or you know, went to study the wrong thing, you may regret like, wow, I really shouldn't have been I don't know, a mime major not to pick on mimes, and now I'm a mime and like, so I regret you know that I study this, and I regret that

I entered into this occupation. This is to your point, I think this may be more common than we think, and I think it's worth again sort of understanding what the shape of it is. Uh, and it's affects in people's lives for sure. I don't know how many people just fall into becoming a mind major, though. I yeah, I was trying to pick something that would be so rare that it you know, I well, my parents the other day what I have this actually had this because

my parents. They're like, was it my foot dock the other day? By blah, I was like, what makes someone become a foot doctor? Like if you're calling, I'm not degrading the foot doctors. They're sort of a very important function. But I think that's sort of the point is like they sort of see like, you know, I'm a doctor, you know, like let me just pick something that will serve a porn function, Like, I mean, what other deep reason other than you know I anyway, I don't want

to get into that too much. Yeah, but there are people who are fascinated by the foot. Yeah, and you know, I feel like, you know, everything we do in our locomotion on a daily basis comes down to the foot. Yeah.

So can you know they exist, you know, in between sort of people and the earth in a way that's transformed like you could really you know, having surveyed and interviewed a lot of people who see lots of different kinds of work as a calling, you know, it's fascinating to see and it's so compelling right when they articulate, when is it about this that's a calling? These things are pretty powerful, really really powerful. I'm going to wrap up today with a quote from individual. I won't say

what their profession is till I'm done. I don't see myself ever stopping working completely. I like it too much. It's very satisfy. I mean, this is an art form for one thing. It's a tremendous art I did a duck for a guy the other day, and when he came and picked it up, he almost started crying because it looks so nice. He was just so happy. And that makes me feel good that he thought I'd done a great job. Self satisfaction is a big deal in any job. It's a big deal in life. And this

is spoken by a taxidermist. Yes I love that quote. Yes, I love it too. And you contracted that with a corporate securities lawyer who didn't need to do do much of a calling for that job. Anyway, I won't read that quote anyway. Thank you. Thank you so much for chagging me today. I'm a great admirer of your work. Thank you so much. Likewise, and I really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you for having me, Scott. Thanks for listening to

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