Abstract
Leaders influence followers’ meaning and play a key role in shaping their employees’ experience of work meaningfulness. While the dominant perspective in theory and in empirical work focuses on the positive influence of leaders on followers’ work meaningfulness, our conceptual model explores conditions in which leaders may harm followers’ sense of meaning. We introduce six types of conditions: leaders’ personality traits, leaders’ behaviors, the relationship between leader and follower, followers’ attributions, followers’ characteristics, and job design under which leaders’ meaning making efforts might harm or ‘kill’ followers’ sense of work meaningfulness. Accordingly, we explore how these conditions may interact with leaders’ meaning making efforts to lower levels of followers’ sense of meaning, and in turn, lead to negative personal outcomes (cynicism, lower well-being, and disengagement), as well as negative organizational outcomes (corrosive organizational energy, higher turnover rates, and lower organizational productivity). By doing so, our research extends the current literature, enabling a more comprehensive understanding of leaders’ influence on followers’ work meaningfulness, while considering the dark side of meaning making.
Highlights
The dominant perspective on leaders’ meaning making role, in both the leadership and the meaningfulness literature, focuses on leaders’ positive influence on followers’ work meaningfulness
While these three components of work meaningfulness are the elements that might be dismantled by leaders’ meaning making, we draw on Lepisto and Pratt’s (2017) recent work to explain what drives and underlies the process of meaning erosion. These scholars differentiate between two ideal-type conceptualizations of meaningful work in the vast literature: the realization and justification perspective (Lepisto and Pratt, 2017). We propose that this dual perspective on meaningful work helps shed light upon the deeper, underlying mechanisms that can be harmed by leaders’ meaning making
According to Shamir et al (1993) identity motivational theory of leadership, followers’ sense of meaning and their need to find meaning is a significant aspect of their organizational life
Summary
The dominant perspective on leaders’ meaning making role, in both the leadership and the meaningfulness literature, focuses on leaders’ positive influence on followers’ work meaningfulness. Followers, who are unable to internalize the higher-order purpose proposed by the leader, due to the value conflict, might struggle to understand the worth of their work Together, both perspectives of realization and justification suggest that followers’ misfit with leaders’ values is a factor that is likely to yield negative effects for leaders’ meaning making on followers. Proposition 5: Followers’ characteristics (misfit between followers’ and leaders’ values as well as followers’ emotional exhaustion) will moderate the effect of leaders’ meaning making attempts on followers’ sense of work meaningfulness, such that (a) followers’ experience of a misfit between their own and leaders’ values, or (b) followers’ emotional exhaustion, will reduce this relationship Another way through which leaders influence followers’ meaning is through structuring the work of their followers and through job design (Hackman and Oldham, 1980). Proposition 8: Followers’ reduced sense of meaningfulness will (a) increase corrosive organizational energy, (b) increase turnover rates, and (c) decrease organizational productivity
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