The Benefits of Meaningful Work: A Meta-Analysis
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Researchers and practitioners alike are increasingly interested in the potential benefits of perceiving work as meaningful. Nonetheless, the strengths of these effect sizes are unknown. The purpose of this paper is to provide a meta-analytical examination of the relationships between work meaningfulness and a variety of work- and life-related outcomes. We meta-analyzed these relationships across 146 independent samples, representing a total sample of N = 70,541. The results indicated that work meaningfulness was strongly associated with a variety of positive outcomes, including heightened motivation (ρ =.55), organizational commitment (ρ =.56), work engagement (ρ =.62), job satisfaction (ρ =.66), hope (ρ =.62), efficacy (ρ =.56), job performance (ρ =.31), positive affect (ρ =.55), work relationships (ρ =.35), citizenship behaviors (ρ =.45), life meaning (ρ =.45) and overall life satisfaction (ρ =.48). Increased perceptions of meaningful work were also strongly negatively related to turnover intentions (ρ =-.39), burnout (ρ =-.40), stress (ρ =-.29), and counterproductive behaviors (ρ =-.41). These results emphasize the strong correlations between the experienced meaningfulness of work and a diversity of positive work-related outcomes. Suggestions for future research in this area are discussed.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it