Your employees are calling: How organizations help or hinder living a calling at work

Abstract

When employees are living a calling at work, they tend to experience greater well-being and the organization also benefits. Despite the integral role of the organization, research has not sufficiently explored what organizational factors might help employees live a calling. Drawing on a tripartite theoretical framework of living a calling— characterized by destiny, personal significance, and social significance— and Work as a Calling Theory, we hypothesize that needs-supplies fit, empowerment, and servant leadership are positively related to living a calling. Further, we hypothesize that the benefits of living a calling extend to the organization via a negative association with deviant behaviors, a positive association with LMX relationships, and that consistency of interests (a facet of grit) is a boundary condition of the proposed relationships. Through testing our hypotheses in a multi-wave, multi-source field study of employees and supervisors in a park district, we find that needs-supplies fit and empowerment facilitate living a calling in an organization. Further, consistency of interests moderates the relationship between living a calling and deviant behaviors and LMX. Our findings indicate how employers might help employees live their callings, and, in turn, mitigate negative and attain positive outcomes.