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Careers and Organization

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MEANINGFUL WORK: EXPLORING BARRIERS INTERVENING AS WELL AS FACTORS ENHANCING EMPLOYEES’ ENGAGEMENT IN MEANINGFUL WORK.

Course: Careers & Organizations
Student: Isabelle van den Tol
Studentnumber: 2509606
Contact: i.vandentol@student.vu.nl
Coordinators: Prof. dr. Svetlana Khapova & Dr. Sylvia van de Bunt
Datum: October 19th, 2015

MEANINGFUL WORK: EXPLORING BARRIERS INTERVENING AS WELL AS FACTORS ENHANCING EMPLOYEES’ ENGAGEMENT IN MEANINGFUL WORK.
ISABELLE VAN DEN TOL
2509606
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Through interviews and literary findings, a qualitative case study has been done to enrich the theory about the factors enhancing and barriers intervening meaningful work. For this case study two interviews were conducted. Together with the literary findings several findings became apparent. There were three sources found that enhance the meaning of work, being: the self, the others and the work context. There were also several constraints found that are intervening the meaning of work. These constraints were the individualism within the jobs, the communication within the management team and the organizational pressure of being as efficient and effective as possible. These constraints together formed the barriers, which has a negative effect on the meaning of work. These findings were then discussed and concluded. Implications of the findings (e.g. limited amount of data) for both theory and practice are discussed.

The area around Human Resource Management (HRM) is rapidly changing. There are changes from the perspective of the people and from the perspective of the organization. This has led to several changes in employees’ career patterns. The questions that derive from these movements are amongst others what these career patterns mean for organizations and how organizations can benefit from employees’ self-managed career

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