Abstract:

Some people experience work as a calling, working for passion and to make a valuable contribution to the world. Other people experience work as a job, working for the remuneration and other material benefits that work provides. The extant literature suggests that people cannot have both a calling and a job orientation to their work; if people are working for the money, they are not working for the meaning, and vice-versa. But despite its prevalence in the literature, this claim has been the subject of surprisingly little direct empirical investigation. We conducted a three-year longitudinal qualitative study of US elementary school teachers that yielded findings that challenge this assumption: the teachers we interviewed were highly motivated by both their pay and their passion to make a positive difference to the lives of their students. At the same time, they experienced a tension between their prosocial and financial motivations, going to lengths in our interviews to explain and justify their choices. We identified multiple rhetorical processes that they used to resolve this tension. They employed these rhetorical strategies to affirm a tension between prosocial work and financial motivations in general, while explaining why it did not apply to them in this case. Building on our findings, we propose a reconceptualization of the job orientations framework, suggesting that the three job orientations are each orthogonal; employees may simultaneously be high, low, or moderate in the extent to which they view their current work as a calling, a job, and a career.

Please choose your submission type: Full Paper

Primary Track: Organisational Psychology

Keywords: Employee Attitudes and Motivations  

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Prof Katherine Klein