Work meaningfulness and effort

• Workers who find their jobs meaningful are more likely to exert effort and agree that they should give their best at work. • Using the WAMI scale and new effort measures, the study finds a strong link between meaningfulness and work effort. • Self-determination is identified as crucial for experiencing meaningful work, with a threshold at the 50th percentile of the SDT distribution. • Integrating psychology and economics reveals how meaningful work drives effort and impacts workplace behavior. • Meaningful work is found to significantly influence effort, offering insights for future research on workplace outcomes. Does experiencing work meaningfulness—defined as perceiving one’s work as personally or socially significant and worthwhile—influence employee effort? Drawing on self-determination theory, we define need satisfaction as the fulfillment of autonomy, competence, and relatedness at work. We develop a utility framework in which need satisfaction enhances motivation, lowers the perceived marginal cost of effort, and fosters work meaningfulness, which in turn increases effort. Using original Dutch LISS panel survey data, we find that autonomy, competence, and relatedness are positively associated with work meaningfulness, which in turn relates to higher self-reported effort and stronger pro-effort attitudes. These results indicate that meaningfulness is not a fixed outcome but one that may be shaped by job design. This would imply that organizations can boost productivity and worker well-being by creating conditions that satisfy employees’ psychological needs. Our findings contribute to labor economics by integrating motivation as an endogenous outcome into labor supply models and by providing empirical evidence on the link between meaningfulness and effort.