Abstract
Despite the recent meaningless work practices’ explosion in organisations, emerging studies in this critical area tend to focus on theorising meaningful work and how resource utilization could enhance the meaningfulness (or purposefulness) of work and change. The critical role of meaningless work practices on organisational change has not been previously studied. This developmental paper aims to re-shape our understanding and knowledge of how meaningfulness – meaninglessness ‘border crossers’ (employees, managers, other stakeholders) experience such practices and their impacts on the emotional, mental and career (tripartite) border experiences of staff and organisations during inter-sectional and inter-organisational change. Additionally, as we do not know how the fluidity within such a tripartite border shift by its influence from meaningless work practices, our aim is to draw from self-determination theory (SDT) and 600 case studies across Poland to test staff’s career satisfaction and emotional exhaustion and their impacts on well-being in organisational change settings. We plan to empirically investigate institutional and structural factors that challenge and/or hinder organisations’ meaningful work practices to advance meaningless work and meaningful, inter-organisational and inter-sectoral change literature and practice. We aim to develop a Dual-Path Research Model that will help management and organisations to identify and mitigate the impacts of meaningless work practices and enhance meaningful and holistic organisational change across organisational, sectoral and conceptual borders.