Your employees are calling:How organizations help or hinder living a calling and how employees react

Abstract

Work as a calling—defined by passion, purpose, meaning, contribution, and a sense of destiny—dates back several centuries, but has experienced a resurgence in popular culture in recent decades, capturing the attention of scholars and employers. Research suggests that having a calling yields extensive benefits for called employees and the organizations they work for, but with one important caveat: employees must be living the calling within the organization. In this paper, we reveal the important role of the organization in providing the conditions necessary for employees to live their callings, by examining how—and to what end—organizations facilitate living a calling. Drawing on a tripartite theoretical framework of living a calling— characterized by destiny, personal significance, and social significance, as well as insights from Work as a Calling Theory, we hypothesize that person-environment fit (at the dimension level), empowerment, and servant leadership are related to living a calling. Further, we hypothesize that the benefits of living a calling extend to the organization, in terms of being negatively associated with employees’ deviant behaviors, as rated by their supervisors, and the personality trait consistency of interest is a boundary condition of this relationship. Through testing our hypotheses in a multi-wave, multi-source field study of employees and their supervisors in a park district— a unique organizational setting for examining workers across a variety of occupations, we find that person-supervisor, person-group, person-organization, needs-supplies, and demands-abilities fit, as well as empowerment and servant leadership facilitate living a calling in the organization. Further, we find that consistency of interest moderates the relationship between living a calling and deviant behaviors. Our findings suggest that employers, who may feel an increasing moral obligation to facilitate meaningful work, can take action to help employees live their callings, and, in turn, mitigate negative consequences.