MEANING AND MEANINGFULNESS IN THE PSYCHOLOGICAL AND ORGANIZATIONAL LITERATURE: A CONCEPTUAL AND EMPIRICAL EXAMINATION

The present work is an attempt to conceptually review and integrate the fragmented literature on meaning and meaningfulness mainly emerged under to two streams of research namely the Psychology of Meaning (POM; Park, 2010) and the Meaning of Work (MOW; Rosso et al. 2010). From an empirical point of view, we try also to assess the impact of different determinants of meaningfulness, derived from our review, on individuals’ effort and creativity. we design an experiment to offer a preliminary test of the effect of meaningfulness on creativity and effort. We argue that individual’s values determine motivational types and that congruence with the underlying value dimensions leads to higher meaningfulness and motivation. In other words, we proposed that extrinsic motivational types have a propensity toward automatic tasks, whereas intrinsic motivational types are related to creative tasks. Thus the experiment let to explore the effect of motivational types and of task framing on effort and creativity. The results confirm our speculation.