Fresh Findings Friday! Meaningful Work and Entrepreneurship

Yep, Looks Fresh!

Source: Chokniti Khongchum, used with permission, Pexels

Welcome to a Fresh Findings Friday post where I share insights from just-published or pre-print research on meaning, purpose, motivation, and meaningful work.

The Takeaway: In a massive study from 16 European countries, self-employed entrepreneurs experience significantly more meaningful work** than employees of more traditional companies. Further, meaningful work has the strongest link to vitality among all workers, over and above autonomy. **Meaningful work was not directly measured but was inferred from two somewhat related questions.

I have said the words myself: "In the modern, global economy, you should consider yourself the CEO of your own company, You." Typing it out, it seems a bit dramatic and cheesy, but when employment contracts, business cycles, and even the location of your office seem infinitely fluid and ever-changing, I have come to agree with the folks who encourage rising generations of workers to think of work and their careers first and foremost through the lenses of their own lives and aspirations.

But what if we take those words seriously? What if you really are the CEO of your own company, You, Inc.? Today, I'll break down a massive new study (Stephan et al., 2020) on the role that meaningful work plays among self-employed entrepreneurs, and look at one answer to the question: Are you better off self-employed?

There are two critical methodological matters to take care of before we get into the results, one strength and one weakness.

• Strength: The Sample. Simply put, this is a report from two very large, nationally representative surveys from Europe. Overall, they ended up sampling from 16 countries and 22,002 people (twenty-two thousand...and two!).
• Weakness: The Measurement. Surveys this large usually do not use entire, validated measures of all the constructs researchers want to look at. I've served on expert panels for similar surveys, and such panels try their best to identify the highest priority concepts for policy and theory, then try to cover as many as possible with a reasonable question or two. That way, when researchers contact potential participants they can say "it only takes a few minutes" instead of "set aside next Tuesday."

  In this case, they did not have a real instrument to measure meaningful work. I know! My headline is all about meaningful work, and they don't even measure it. What they did instead was use two conceptually related items that seem aligned in spirit: "doing useful work" and doing "a job well done." To help us understand the size of any gap between these two questions and actual measures of meaningful work, they reported correlations with prominent meaningful work scales from a separate sample. These correlations were very large, .76-.83. From this, I would conclude that the extra sample of people they surveyed did not distinguish much between the questions about job well done vs. meaningful work. This is definitely not equivalent to saying they actually measured meaningful work, but it does leave open the possibility that we would expect a similar pattern of results if they had.

So, just keep in mind that when I, and the study authors, write "meaningful work" there is a giant asterisk that says **we think this is at least kind of like meaningful work even though it isn't really the same.

Here are the most interesting results:

1. Compared to people employed at other people's companies, self-employed entrepreneurs reported higher levels of meaningful work, or at least felt they did useful work and a job well done.
2. They also reported higher levels of work autonomy and vitality.
3. Meaningful work was the most important contributor to the vitality of all of the workers in the study, whether self-employed or not. It was more important than age, gender, income, education, and the unemployment rate of the worker's country. Meaningful work was even more important than work autonomy. Think about that. Even among people who are literally their own bosses, meaningful work was more important than autonomy! (Researchers used multiple regression in a mediation/indirect effects analysis to quantify this.)
4. In an interesting twist, it did not matter how much social support for entrepreneurship existed in the countries where self-employed entrepreneurs lived — they reported high levels of meaningful work regardless of what others thought. But, workers employed in other people's companies reported significantly more meaningful work where there was higher social support for entrepreneurship. I think this is really fascinating. Could it be that ambient support of and appreciation for entrepreneurship raises the tide of meaningful work for everyone? Economists and public policy experts, give me a call!

This is an exciting study, with some fascinating tidbits for people like me who are interested in helping people find the richest, most fulfilling, and meaningful work lives they can attain. It is very disappointing that this study still comes up short of actually informing us about meaningful work specifically, but it is a good sign in a couple of ways: (a) Clearly feeling like the work you do is useful and well done is important. Several experts, including myself (Steger, 2017), include these ideas in our models of meaningful work (see also Michael Pratt at Boston College); (b) Meaningful work is becoming such an important topic that people say they're studying it even when they're not.