Search results

Meaningfulness at work means experience of work as important, satisfying and valuable. It is a key factor in promoting individual growth, strengthening the belief in one's own abilities and supporting a sense of belonging and commitment to the organization. In this paper, we explore managers' perceptions of meaningful work in the future, focusing on managers' talk about meaningful work and its promotion in their organizations.

The data for the study consists of 25 stories of future working life collected from Finnish managers in spring 2022, using the empathy-based method.

From managers' stories of future working life, we identified two overarching perception categories of meaningful work: (1) Perceptions of contexts underlining the experience of meaningfulness: evolving technologies, developing expertise and demands and change in working life values and (2) Perceptions of management practices determining meaningful work: leader-centered, distant and technical management practice versus participatory and interactive management practice.

The research produces a new and detailed understanding of the ways in which managers talk about decreasing and increasing meaningfulness at work and management practices related to it. As the research is qualitative in nature and based on a small dataset, its results cannot be generalized. Instead, it strengthens and sharpens the previous understanding of meaningful work and the future of work.

The purpose of this study is to identify the challenges of low hierarchy and self-organised structures for employees’ learning and competency development at work. In the past decade, interest in employees’ and organisations’ self-directedness has increased. Self-organised structures are perceived as better able to answer to the quickly changing requirements of clients and business environments. Within these structures, employees are expected to take on more responsibility and maintain more control over their workplace learning, which means they must be self-directed and autonomous. An important question for this approach is how can workplace learning and employee competence development be enhanced.

Two self-organised Finnish information and communication technology-companies participated in the study. With the help of data-driven content analysis, 36 interviews were analysed.

Unclear roles, structures and areas of responsibility caused challenges during the guidance and support of learning, for long-term and sustainable professional development possibilities and in organising and prioritizing work tasks related to learning.

In self-organised structures, there should be a means of the better supporting individual- and team-based learning. This will allow learning to have as much value as possible in the future and, therefore, be more sustainable. The findings are also important to be taken into account in managers’ and HR professionals’ education and training.

The findings of this study can offer insights into employees’ well-being emerging from the possibility to learn and be supported in that learning especially in self-organised structures, which so far has been scarcely studied.

Company stakeholder responsibility considers stakeholder engagement and management as key to long-term firm success. The purpose of this paper is to examine how top managers’ stakeholder responsibility attitudes change and how they balance stakeholder responsibilities and economic interests.

The authors conducted empirical research using the company stakeholder responsibility framework by conducting a repeated cross-sectional survey in Finland in 1994, 1999, 2004, 2009 and 2014.

The study shows how development in the business context influences managers’ attitudes towards stakeholder responsibility. Simultaneously with the expansion of free competition in 1990s Finland, managerial commitment to company stakeholder responsibility strengthened in Finnish industry.

The target group consisting of industrial managers both in a single-country context and the social desirability bias present in survey research may limit the generalisability of the results.

The study contributes to the discussion of the role of situational factors in the development of corporate responsibility by showing that while economic changes have some influence on managerial attitudes, the expansion of free markets, together with increased regulation in certain areas, appears to influence managers’ stakeholder responsibility attitudes to an even greater degree.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between the ethical culture of organisations and organisational innovativeness.

A quantitative empirical analysis was conducted on the basis of a survey of 147 respondents within the public sector in Finland. A multivariate linear regression analysis was done to examine how the ethical culture of organisations is related to organisational innovativeness.

A positive link was found in the ethical culture of an organisation and organisational innovativeness: ethical culture was important to behavioural, strategic and process innovativeness. Within the ethical culture of an organisation, the dimension of the congruency of management in particular had an important role in organisational innovativeness.

The data were collected from the public sector, and therefore, future studies from the private sector organisations are needed. The results lend support to previous research arguments for the positive effect of an ethical organisational culture on organisational outcomes, particularly the organisational innovativeness described in this paper.

It is suggested that congruency of management, discussability and supportability are the organisational virtues which can most effectively enhance organisational innovativeness, specifically behavioural, strategic and process innovativeness in practice.

The research paper provides empirical evidence on the interrelation between the ethical culture of organisations and organisational innovativeness; evidence which is scarce in existing literature on organisational innovativeness. Thus, the paper helps fill this gap in the literature in the field.