Characterizing Meaningfulness in Industry: A Qualitative Study

Providing meaning in the workplace has become an expectation placed on management. Organizations view this as a driver of engagement and performance. However, meaningfulness cannot be prescribed. It is constructed by employees themselves, based on their work and collective experience. Management can therefore only support meaningfulness if it understands what it entails for employees. This is precisely where research has shed the least light. We are increasingly adept at measuring meaningfulness, predicting its effects, and identifying its antecedents. We are much less able to describe what concretely constitutes meaning, particularly for frontline teams outside the service sector. This case study addresses this issue in the energy industry. We conducted three successive focus groups with six maintenance teams at an industrial site undergoing transformation (N = 41 participants). The inductive-deductive thematic analysis links fundamental psychological needs with the dimensions of meaningful work experience. Two main findings emerge: (1) Meaningfulness for these teams rests on two pillars: technical mastery and the collective. Autonomy and beneficence appear as conditional sources, dependent on a clear framework and the concrete implementation of organizational discourse. (2) The main obstacle to meaningfulness stems not from psychological needs but from organizational ambiguity surrounding the ongoing transition, which employees themselves link to the erosion of their sources of meaningfulness. These findings suggest treating organizational clarity as a prerequisite for meaningful work and identify concrete levers for change management.