But I Don’t Even Know You: Experiencing Work Meaningfulness from Unmet Beneficiaries

Research on relational job design has provided strong evidence that when jobs provide opportunities for contact with beneficiaries of the work, employees are more likely to experience work meaningfulness in the form of prosocial behavior and motivation, affective commitment to beneficiaries and perceptions of impact. However, not all jobs are (or can be) designed to provide workers contact with beneficiaries of their work. Three studies tested whether workers may still experience their work as meaningful when they emotionally and cognitively connect to beneficiaries without contact. Experiment 1 found that empathy for unmet beneficiaries is positively related to prosocial behavior, via perceived impact on and affective commitment to unmet beneficiaries. Experiment 2 found that personalized information about an unmet beneficiary’s need (and not perspective taking) is the key trigger to inducing prosocial behavior, and that perceived impact on and affective commitment to unmet beneficiaries mediated this effect, as well. Experiment 3 found that the effect on prosocial behavior and motivation of personalized information about an unmet beneficiary is stronger when beneficiaries are portrayed as worthy rather than unworthy. This research has implications for the study of relational job design, work meaningfulness, empathy, and the mechanisms that elicit prosocial behavior and motivation at work.