Work and Employment
I examine how people build sustainable careers doing mission-driven work,
with a particular focus on the work-life interface.
The dark side of deeply meaningful work
While people increasingly seek meaningful work, we know little about potential downsides to that meaningful work. This project draws upon in-depth interview data with 82 international aid workers to detail the multi-faceted work-relationship experience among those in deeply meaningful work. First, I find that people who experience their work as deeply meaningful have high work devotion. I identify boundary inhibition as a mechanism to explain why they participate more willingly in overwork and erratic work, despite giving rise to time- and trust-based conflict in their relationships. Second, I find that people with high work devotion often also experience emotional distance in their personal relationships when their close others don’t value their work (i.e. occupational value heterophily). This disconnection–based conflict compounds the time- and trust-based conflict and engenders an emotionally agonizing situation, which I call work-relationship turmoil. Third, and in contrast, when close others do value their partner’s work (i.e. occupational value homophily) it fosters an emotional connection and offers an avenue for work-relationship enrichment, mitigating the time- and trust-based conflict arising from overwork and erratic work. People with high work devotion understand that occupational value homophily is a conflict mitigation tool. Respondents actively sought value homophilous relationships, both through the pursuit of longer-term, sustaining relationships with friends, family, and significant others, and also through more temporary relationships — colloquially referred to as affairs. The paper identifies mechanisms for the double-edged sword of deeply meaningful work, providing guidance and support to students, managers, and organizations. Furthermore, insights regarding employee well-being likely have carry-on effects to organizational performance and the clients served by international aid workers and the nonprofit workforce more broadly.
work devotion as identity armor
Work-life research often focuses attention on “work-family” conflict experienced by people in established, nuclear families. This project examines how people who desire a family experience and navigate work-related decisions. Using interview data on 84 international aid workers, paired with seven years of longitudinal survey and parsed resume data, I identify that people with family aspirations and high work devotion experience greater stress in career decision-making than their family-rooted counterparts or those who aren’t devoted to work. My research reveals that when facing this decision, people with family aspirations often double down and prioritize work, suggesting that people who are devoted to work fear the loss of identity that it provides, despite the high cost to thwarted personal aspirations. I demonstrate the tremendous fulfillment, but also the remarkable vulnerability, of holding a work-related identity at the core of one’s sense of self. I find that this vulnerability can lead to an existential crisis when the work devoted self feels threatened by the arrival of a new identity, in this case, a possible relationship self – often resulting in doubling down and prioritizing work as a form of identity armor. I suggest that organizations fostering work devotion from their employees may paradoxically retain employees who are deeply personally discontented, likely having negative effects on both their well-being and their performance at work.
the myth of agency
Many people who aim to help others through their work do not simply close down the computer at the end of the day — they work directly with clients and must navigate complicated work-life boundaries as a result. Driven by the overarching question of how work-life boundaries are experienced by people in relational work, in 2016 I began an in-depth field study of staff across ten workforce development organizations in the Twin Cities. Though there is a robust stream of scholarship that examines how discretion on the part of front-line workers influences policy implementation, limited attention has been paid to their private lives or to their experiences of the work-life interface. This project develops more robust theory with implications for practice that integrates considerations of front-line employees’ work-life experiences and public service work practices.
How Warm is the glow?
Many people enjoy doing work that helps others (i.e. “prosocial work”), however research has not fully reconciled how prosocial work preferences and experiences interact to influence outcomes of interest. To examine this question in a robust manner requires using parallel measures for preferences and experiences. As the public service motivation (PSM) instrument measures personal values, rather than work preferences, it is psychometrically impossible to construct parallel work experience measures. To address this gap, this project develops and presents an original scale, and uses polynomial regression models and response surface methodology for the analysis. Together with my collaborator, Alyce Eaton, we demonstrate that prosocial work experience is associated with greater job satisfaction for those with the highest prosocial work preferences, but associated with reduced job satisfaction for those with the lowest prosocial work preferences, emphasizing the importance of analyzing interactive effects. We compare this new scale with analyses of PSM on the same sample, substantiating its complementary utility.
Full Paper (Nonprofit Management and Leadership), Full Paper (Review of Public Personnel Administration)