Meaningful work, employeeship and well-being: Bringing employees’ dignity in the workplace

Abstract

Meaningfulness work has been gaining significance since the beginning of the 21st Century. This paper attempts to clarify the meaning of meaningful work as a moral issue and how it is linked to employee’s well‐being by introducing a concept of ‘employeeship’ to bring dignity at workplace. It critiques work-life balance and argues for integrating meaningful work within the work-life continuum. Employee engagement has recently become a significant topic both within human resources management consultancy and academic research. However, there are many different meanings associated with employee engagement and a variety of factors have been identified and proposed for employee engagement. These factors although may contribute to meaningfulness of work, meaningful activity is not clearly liked to well‐being. Therefore, this paper shows the link between meaningful activity and well‐being and argues for the just context rooted in self-respect to bring employees’ dignity at workplace. It introduces a concept of ‘employeeship’ and shows the importance of normative context of well‐being. It conceptualizes employeeship for ‘self‐leading’ which is constituted by autonomy, ownership and responsibility. Leadership without counterpart of employeeship can lead to undermining employees’ dignity through depriving their self-respect. This paper further attempts to show that the minimal and common conditions of freedom as non‐domination and recognition for employeeship can lead to skilful performance of employees facing fair challenges. Based on these conceptual understanding, this paper briefly discusses some implications for management in terms of leadership and concludes with further research directions in this important topic of interest.