Meaning or Money? Examining Preferences for Meaningful Work and Compensation

Abstract

Workers often face challenging decisions about whether to prioritize meaningful work or high compensation. Tradeoffs between meaningful work and compensation have received extensive theoretical attention, but limited empirical examination. Across three studies, the present investigation examined the relative importance of salary and meaningful work to job evaluations and probed the extent to which high salaries are believed to promote meaningful work. Study 1 (N=408) demonstrated that people prioritize high salaries over highly meaningful work when evaluating hypothetical jobs. Study 2 (N=187) showed that participants overwhelmingly preferred a hypothetical high-salary job with low meaningfulness to a low-salary job with high meaningfulness. Finally, Study 3 (N=171) illustrated that high-salary jobs are expected to provide more meaningful work than medium or low-salary jobs. These results suggest that salary is paramount to meaningful work in hypothetical job evaluations and that people believe that salary is highly influential to the experience of meaningful work.