Organizational research has recognized that many people imbue their work with meaning, purpose, passion, and even feel a calling towards the work. However, we know very little about how people lose that meaning or calling, or why they might find themselves disenchanted with the work they used to love. Research has acknowledged that people experience disillusionment with their work and may even experience trauma or grief as a result of this disillusionment, but we have yet to explain these phenomena in a theoretically meaningful way.
My dissertation research addresses this gap and aims to establish the phenomenon of disenchantment with work in organizational scholarship.
Building on prior work on meaningful work, idealization, and moralization, I have developed a theoretical model which explains how and why people become disenchanted with their work. I argue that to be enchanted with one’s work involves the idealization and moralization of the work, which can manifest through many pathways such as calling, and that disenchantment is caused by experiences that contradict those idealized and moralized beliefs about the work. I explore this phenomenon using both quantitative and qualitative methods.
One study is a field survey of physicians at the beginning of their residencies and one year into their residencies. Participants’ enchantment with the medical profession is established at baseline and re-measured one year later, along with a battery of questions to unearth possible individual and situational predictors of physician disenchantment. Another is a qualitative investigation based on semi-structured interviews of people in prosocial, public-service professions (i.e., law enforcement, healthcare, teaching, and social work) who self-reported feeling disenchanted with their work. This study is an in-depth narrative analyses of the lived experiences of these individuals to unearth insights on why some people may become disenchanted while others do not, and how people try to buffer against or cope with disenchantment with their work.
More broadly, my overarching research interests involve exploring the psychological, sociological, and behavioral factors that influence people’s idealizations and moralizations of their work, and especially on when those idealizations and moralizations become maladaptive as is the case with disenchantment. I am also interested in interventions that may help mitigate the negative consequences of such beliefs and experiences or prevent them from happening entirely.