Producing and Regulating Work Meaningfulness Through Purposegiving During an Organizational Change

Organizational purpose has become central in debates on management and business–society relations. Although the link between purpose and meaningful work is well established, how purpose communication is mobilized to manage meaningfulness remains underexamined. This Grounded Theory study draws on interviews with 20 mid-level managers in a large Nordic public manufacturing company and develops a model of producing and regulating meaningful work through purposegiving via three purpose practices across the employment cycle: recruiting with purpose, crafting bigger picture and professional pride, and assessing others’ engagement with purpose. These practices are designed to orient employees toward meaningfulness by drawing on macro-level societal meanings and translating them into micro-level work experiences. However, the findings show that purpose is advanced and assessed in divergent ways depending on organizational position and proximity to everyday production work. Employees variously embrace, reinterpret, or resist managerial purpose narratives, rendering purpose communication a contested and negotiated process rather than a neutral or uniformly motivating force. The study contributes to organizational communication by conceptualizing organizational purpose as a managerial mechanism for governing organizational meanings and identities. It advances meaningful work scholarship by reframing meaningfulness as an intersubjective, communicatively constructed process.