Conversation Hour Presentation 6th World Congress on Positive Psychology 2019

Strategic Conversation to Promote Meaningful Work as an OD Tool (#161)

Shizuka Modica 1 2
  1. Kyoto College of Graduate Studies for Informatics, Kyoto, Japan
  2. The University of Virginia, the Darden School of Business, Charlottesville, VA, USA

This Conversation Hour is an opportunity for researchers, consultants, coaches, and organizational leaders to: 1) discuss the state of meaning-centered approaches within organizational development settings; and 2) generate collective insights on how we can strategically promote meaningful work toward more humane and sustainable organizational development.

Corporations still predominantly use Gallup’s Employee Engagement Survey as a proxy for productivity. Yet the employee engagement rate in the US has been steady over the past decade at around 31%; worldwide, around 13%. Given the situation, corporations are in search for a replacement measure of employee productivity, and a big shift toward “employee wellbeing” and “happiness at work” are taking place. However, we are still missing the happiness-counterpart in wellbeing, or “meaningful work.” Fortunately, the corporate world now shows its readiness to try meaning-centered approaches to manage human productivity.

We will examine three models. Models will be chosen from the Askinosie Chocolate Model (Askinosie & Askinosie, 2017), the Conscious Capitalism Model (Sisodia, Henry, & Eckschmidt, 2018), the Elements of Meaningfulness Ecosystem (Bailey & Madden, 2016), the Holistic Development Model (Lips-Wiersma & Morris, 2011), the Meaningful Work Model (Chalofsky, 2010), the Meaning-of-Work Theory for High Performance (Modica, 2007), and the Positive Professionals Model (Brafford, 2017).