Navigating Incongruent Perspectives of Meaningful Work: Moral Outrage and Inhabited Institutions

Abstract

While others play a fundamental role in constituting and legitimating meaningful work, how individuals negotiate incongruence between self and others’ perceptions remains unexplored. Drawing from a case study of promotion reform within a STEM-focused higher education institution, we utilize an abductive analytical approach to develop a model of how individuals move beyond individually-experienced incongruence between self and others’ perceptions of meaningful work to collectively transform what constitutes meaningful work within their organization. We identify three meso-processes—1) articulating incongruence; 2) voicing moral outrage and 3) integrating organizational distinctiveness and external legitimacy—and show how they build upon each other over time to enable actors to transform the institutional arrangements that maintained and reified incongruence. Our contributions are threefold. We develop a model of how actors navigate incongruent perceptions of meaningful work among a multiplex of relevant others, and the meso-processes undergirding this process. Second, we contribute to research at the interface of meaningful work and business ethics by showing how moral outrage helps forge collective action and greater congruence around what constitutes meaningful work. Third, we introduce an inhabited institutions perspective to scholarship on meaningful work. In so doing, we show how individuals are both bounded by and exert agency over existing institutional arrangements, and help springboard future research on meaningful work embedded within both organizational and institutional contexts.