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The Experience and Implications of Meaningless Work in the Public Sector

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Abstract

Research suggests that the experience of meaningless work is prevalent in various occupations, and that it is destructive for organizations and individuals, making this an issue of major ethical importance. In this paper, we present the results of a qualitative study based on interviews with Canadian public servants who self-identified as experiencing meaninglessness at work. Our main goal is to better understand participants' responses to the experience of meaningless work and the broader implications their experiences had on the rest of their lives. We surface and explore the harms inflicted on participants through their experiences with meaningless work and suggest that these harms may have been made worse by structural features of our study's public-sector setting. We contribute to organization studies literature by showing the intersection of meaningless work with three related concepts: bullshit jobs, empty labour, and functional stupidity and argue that our empirical findings complement and complicate these frameworks by presenting the complex but hidden emotional experiences that can accompany outwardly observable workplace behaviours.

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Acknowledgements

We wish to thank Suhaib Riaz for his helpful feedback on an earlier version of this paper. We wish also to thank our manuscript’s editor at the Journal of Business Ethics, Bernadette Loacker, and three anonymous reviewers for their deep engagement with our paper and their helpful comments and suggestions. We are grateful to the anonymous moderators of an online discussion forum for public servants who allowed us to post recruitment materials. This work was supported in part through a SSHRC Insight Grant (#435-2020-0270) and the Telfer School of Management Research Fund (# 602733-110199-2001).

Funding

We acknowledge the financial support of the Telfer School of Management research Fund # 602733-110199-2001 and SSHRC Insight Grant 435-2020-0270 for this study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa, 55 Laurier Avenue East, Ottawa, ON, K1N 6N5, Canada

    Christopher Belanger, Samia Chreim & Silvia Bonaccio

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  1. Christopher Belanger
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  2. Samia Chreim
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Correspondence to Christopher Belanger.

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Competing interest

Financial interests: The authors have no financial interests to disclose. Non-financial interests: The authors have no non-financial interests to disclose.

Ethics Approval for Research Involving Human Participants

Approval for this study was obtained from the University of Ottawa Office of Research Ethics and Integrity (ethics file number: S-06-20-5832).

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study, including informed consent for publication of anonymized quotations from interview transcripts.

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Belanger, C., Chreim, S. & Bonaccio, S. The Experience and Implications of Meaningless Work in the Public Sector. J Bus Ethics (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-024-05646-7

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