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A Longitudinal Study of Meaningfulness of Work: Its Relations with Job Outcomes in the Police Force

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Abstract

This study utilized a longitudinal design, four weeks apart, to examine how clan control affected meaningfulness of work that in turn enhanced job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and organizational identity. Participants were 143 police officers. Results demonstrated that police officers who perceived that the organization created an environment in which officers shared and enact common values, perspectives, and accounted for their actions (clan control) reported that their jobs as having more positive meanings (meaningfulness of work). Officers who experienced more meaningfulness of work were found to have higher affective organizational commitment, job satisfaction, and organizational identity four weeks later. In addition, job satisfaction was found to be partially mediating the effect of meaningfulness of work on affective organizational commitment. Our results suggested that meaningfulness of work could be induced by clan control which emphasizes shared values, beliefs, and traditions, which is the most appropriate in complex organizations nowadays where employees oftentimes engage in different tasks for a common organizational goal, with hard-to-measure performance indicators.

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Funding

This study was funded by “Research Funding Support” provided to postgraduate students by the Department of Psychology of The Chinese University of Hong Kong (no number).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, Hong Kong, China

    Fai Ho Choi, Wing Tung Au, Otilia Tung Wai Hui & Yang Yang

  2. Hong Kong Police Force, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, Hong Kong, China

    Ka Mei Leung & Sau Mee Chiu

Authors
  1. Fai Ho Choi
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  2. Wing Tung Au
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  3. Otilia Tung Wai Hui
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  4. Ka Mei Leung
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  5. Sau Mee Chiu
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  6. Yang Yang
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Correspondence to Wing Tung Au.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical Approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee (Survey and Behavioural Research Ethics Committee of the Chinese University of Hong Kong) and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Appendix

Appendix

Pilot Study of Managerial Control on Meaningfulness of Work

Long et al. (2011) developed three scenarios for each of the three managerial control mechanisms, namely market, bureaucratic, and clan control. In each scenario, there was a paragraph describing the team and another paragraph describing the supervisor, according to the features of the specific control mechanism. A total of 142 students from a local university participated in the study. They were randomly and evenly assigned into one of three between-subject conditions (market, bureaucratic, or clan control). Participants role-played an employee working in the organization as described in the scenario. Participants then reported their meaningfulness of work as measured by WAMI (Steger et al. 2012) on a seven-point scale (1 = absolutely untrue; 7 = absolutely true). A one-way between-subject ANOVA showed that meaningfulness of work differed significantly across the three managerial control mechanisms (F(2, 136) = 6.736, p = .002). Post hoc comparisons using the Tukey HSD test indicated that the mean score for the clan control condition (M = 4.21, SD = 1.06) was significantly higher than the market control (M = 3.48, SD = 1.11) and bureaucratic control (M = 3.39, SD = 1.39) conditions. These results suggest that clan control resulted in higher meaningfulness of work than market control or bureaucratic control

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Choi, F.H., Au, W.T., Hui, O.T.W. et al. A Longitudinal Study of Meaningfulness of Work: Its Relations with Job Outcomes in the Police Force. J Police Crim Psych 36, 124–131 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11896-020-09370-6

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