Purpose at Work Is Bigger Than Having a Calling

Most career advice about purpose treats it like a single switch — you either have a calling or you don't. The more I sat with the workplace-purpose research, the less that picture survives contact with the data.

This post zooms into the P from the four-pillar overview — Purpose, the pillar I expected to be the most familiar and turned out to be the most pluralistic. There isn't one purpose at work; there's a stack.

The puzzle has a sharper version, too. In their 2009 Administrative Science Quarterly study of zookeepers across 157 zoos, Bunderson & Thompson found that a calling is "binding and ennobling" — workers with a strong sense of calling find more meaning in the work and are more willing to sacrifice pay, comfort, and personal time for it. If a calling brings both meaning and willingness to be exploited, "do you have a calling?" is the wrong yes/no question. The right one is: what is the structure underneath the word, and which parts of it are pulling you?

The reframe I came away with: "purpose at work" isn't a binary. It splits into at least three orientations toward work, three measurable facets of meaning, and eight different sources you can actually draw from — which means most people who say they "have" or "don't have" a sense of purpose are running a binary check on a much richer space.

The cost of getting that binary wrong is large. BetterUp's 2018 Meaning and Purpose at Work survey of 2,285 US professionals found 9 in 10 workers would trade an average of 23% of future earnings — about $21,000 a year — for work that always feels meaningful. People are negotiating real money against a question whose framing the research has already complicated.

This post walks each of those three views — orientations, facets, sources — because each one answers a slightly different question, and most popular writing on purpose at work flattens all three into one.

What the workplace literature actually means by purpose

Only 21% of the world's employees feel engaged at work, according to Gallup's 2024 State of the Global Workplace. When 79% of workers don't feel engaged, "purpose" stops being a luxury concept — it's the variable that explains the gap, and the looseness around the word is what lets companies dodge it. UC Berkeley's Dacher Keltner, in his lecture series on the science of happiness at work, gives a tight definition that clears up most of the loose usage:

A sense of purpose at work involves engaging in activities that you find personally meaningful, that contribute to others or to the world in a way you care about, and that don't harm anyone in the process.

Three pieces in there worth slowing down on:

1. Personally meaningful — your meaning, not someone else's.
2. Contribute to others or the world — not just self-development.
3. No harm — quietly does a lot of work in screening out hollow versions of "purpose."

Keltner draws explicitly on Yale management professor Amy Wrzesniewski, whose research goes one step further. For Wrzesniewski, the strongest version of purpose is what she calls a calling — work whose meaning is moral, social, and personally significant.

The 2017 World Happiness Report puts a number under the construct: in many parts of the world, people who work and have a sense of purpose are happier than people who work without one — and in most of those same regions, working at all beats not working on the same scale. Purpose is doing real work on the dependent variable, and it's doing it on top of "having a job," not inside it.

That's the official definition. The interesting question is what kind of structure sits under it.

Three orientations — job, career, calling

When Wrzesniewski, McCauley, Rozin, and Schwartz surveyed 24 college administrative assistants in 1997 — same role, same employer — the group split almost evenly into thirds across job, career, and calling orientations. Same job, three different lives. Orientation, not role, is what most variation in purpose is tracking. The three they identified:

A job orientation treats work primarily as an income source for life outside of work. A career orientation treats it as a path of advancement — power, prestige, mastery. A calling orientation treats work as fulfilling because the work itself contributes to something the person sees as meaningful.

What clicked for me is that all three orientations show up inside every occupation Wrzesniewski's lab has studied. Brain surgeons can hold a job orientation. Groundskeepers can hold a calling orientation. Orientation predicts job satisfaction, life satisfaction, and engagement more strongly than job title does.

The most striking data point is the West Point study. Wrzesniewski's team has tracked over 10,000 cadets for roughly 14 years — a population where you'd assume calling orientation is universal, since the entire pipeline is built on serving the country. There's still meaningful variance. Cadets with stronger calling orientations make it through West Point at higher rates, last longer in the military, and earn better evaluations as officers.

That's the part that broke my prior. Even in a job designed end-to-end as service, you can't assume the calling is loaded by the role. It's loaded by the person's stance.

If orientation is one cut, measurement is the next.

Three measurable facets — Steger's WAMI

The cleanest measurement model in this space is Michael Steger's Work and Meaning Inventory (WAMI), published in the Journal of Career Assessment in 2012. Steger's argument is that "meaning at work" had been measured in dozens of incompatible ways for decades, so he and his coauthors broke the construct into three primary facets:

• Positive Meaning in work (PM) — the subjective sense that what I'm doing matters and is significant to me.
• Meaning Making through work (MM) — the work helps me build broader meaning in my life: who I am, what I value, what I'm here to do.
• Greater Good motivations (GG) — my work has a positive impact on others.

When the team validated the scale on 370 university employees across diverse occupations, WAMI scores correlated with greater well-being, more job satisfaction, more career commitment, fewer days absent, and stronger life satisfaction — and they predicted unique variance beyond the usual predictors of job satisfaction. In other words, knowing how someone scores on WAMI tells you something about their life that "How satisfied are you with your job?" doesn't.

The reason WAMI matters for this post: it formalizes Wrzesniewski's calling concept. PM is roughly the personal-significance piece. MM is the integration-with-life piece. GG is the contribution-to-others piece. Calling, in Steger's measurement model, is all three at once. A pure job orientation is mostly PM-empty and GG-empty. A pure career orientation might be heavy on PM-via-mastery but light on GG.

Three orientations, three facets — and at least eight raw materials underneath.

Eight sources of meaning, sorted into four buckets

The piece that reorganized how I think about purpose at work is Morten Hansen and Dacher Keltner's Eight Ways to Find More Meaning at Work, published in Greater Good Magazine. They argue that "meaning at work" doesn't reduce to one source. It comes from at least eight, organized into four buckets:

Walking each bucket is worth the time, because the moves you'd make to strengthen one are different from the moves you'd make to strengthen another.

Purpose: contributions beyond yourself. This is the calling-shaped one. Hansen and Keltner cite Kiva — a nonprofit channeling micro-loans to entrepreneurs in poverty — as a case where the work is unambiguously oriented toward greater-good contribution. Critics like Umair Haque, in Betterness: Economics for Humans, push back that most work has no broader social mission, because most products don't. Hansen and Keltner concede that, then point to Teresa Amabile and Steve Kramer's What Makes Work Worth Doing? counterpoint: even ordinary work can be infused with purpose if employees experience their work as making positive contributions to others. Danone reframing itself as a "healthy foods" company, and divesting its biscuit business, is the example they use. The cleanest test of this comes from Adam Grant's call-center study at Wharton: fundraisers who spent five minutes hearing from a scholarship student spiked 142% in weekly minutes on the phone and 171% in weekly revenue over the next month, while fundraisers who only read the same student's letter showed no change. The litmus test isn't the company's mission statement — it's whether you have a 5-minute story of someone your work helped.

Self-realization: learning. Hansen and Keltner's example is the MBA-to-McKinsey/BCG pipeline, or wanting to learn marketing at Procter & Gamble. People accept tougher hours for explicit access to skill-building. Learning is meaningful even when the immediate work isn't, because it expands who you become.

Self-realization: accomplishment. The example here is the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi — a sushi chef whose pursuit of perfection gives his life intrinsic meaning. Lucy Kellaway at the Financial Times argues there's no real social mission in better sushi. Hansen and Keltner's response is that the meaning isn't only social. The work itself, done well, generates meaning through the achievement.

Prestige: status. "Where do you work?" at a cocktail party. "I'm a doctor at Harvard Medical School" carries something. Status is a real source of meaning for some people — and pretending otherwise doesn't make the data go away.

Prestige: power. Paul Lawrence and Nitin Nohria, in Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices, argue that some people are drawn to work specifically because it's an arena for acquiring and exercising power. The point isn't that this is good or bad; it's that for those people, the experience of meaning at work tracks their access to power. Diagnostically, that means a power-source person who keeps "advancing" into roles with more title and less actual decision authority will report rising prestige and falling meaning at the same time — and won't know why.

Social: belonging. Southwest Airlines is the cultural example. In a moment when loneliness is rising, the workplace functions as a real community for many people — sometimes complementing other communities (family, neighborhood), sometimes substituting. The implication for remote-work design lands hard: stripping the workplace of its community function strips a meaning source most people aren't replacing anywhere else.

Social: agency. Employees experience meaning when their ideas matter — when their input shapes how the place performs. Agency is the felt sense that you're not interchangeable.

Social: autonomy. Dan Pink's Drive makes the case that autonomy is one of the strongest intrinsic motivators. Entrepreneurs frequently start businesses partly to be their own boss. Some kinds of work (consultants, surgeons, professors) carry built-in autonomy that other kinds don't. The diagnostic test is simple: in your role, who decides how the work gets done? If the answer is mostly someone else, the autonomy source is closed off — no matter how much the other seven are compensating.

The "so what" of the eight-source list, for me, is what Hansen and Keltner say at the end: more isn't necessarily better. Experiencing one of these deeply may be enough. But if you don't experience any of them, that's a signal — and the right move is to pick one and start building.

That's the first reframe of this post. The second is harder.

"But isn't this just relabeling things people already like about their jobs?"

The skeptic's claim is that "purpose at work" is just downstream of personality and circumstance. People with stable, agreeable, optimistic dispositions report meaning across whatever job they're in. People in well-managed companies with autonomy and learning report meaning. The eight-source list is a tour through pleasant working conditions plus some self-help vocabulary on top.

That objection has real force. Two pieces of evidence complicate it.

First, the WAMI scale predicts unique variance. Steger's 2012 validation specifically tested whether WAMI scores explained outcomes beyond what standard predictors of job satisfaction already explained. They did. Even after controlling for the usual confounds, people who score high on WAMI's three facets report fewer days absent, more career commitment, and stronger life satisfaction. If "meaning at work" were entirely an artifact of personality or pleasant conditions, the unique-variance term would shrink to zero. It doesn't.

Second, Wrzesniewski's West Point data has the same person looking different across the orientation cuts. A cadet's job orientation versus calling orientation predicts whether they make it through, how long they stay, and how their officers rate them — controlling for the kinds of demographics that personality skeptics would normally lean on. The orientation isn't fully reducible to the trait.

There's also a sharper version of the skeptic's case worth handling — the one this post opened with. Bunderson and Thompson's zookeeper finding is that callings can be self-exploitative: workers with strong callings accept underpayment and personal sacrifice as the price of meaning. If the construct is real, the worry goes, it might be one we should be cautious about strengthening.

The portfolio framing is what defuses that worry. A double-edged sword cuts hardest when meaning is concentrated in a single source, because losing that source feels existentially expensive next to whatever cost is being absorbed. Distributing meaning across orientation, facets, and the eight raw materials lowers the leverage any one source has on you. Bunderson and Thompson's caution is real, and the answer to it isn't to abandon calling — it's to stop treating it as the only meaning source in the room.

The honest version of where the literature lands: orientation, facets, and sources aren't only labels for pre-existing dispositions. They capture something the dispositions don't fully reach — and the part they capture is what shifts when someone changes how they hold their work, even when nothing else changes. That "even when nothing else changes" piece is what the next post in this series will pick up, on cultivation.

Purpose as a portfolio, not a destiny

Stepping back, the picture I'm left with is that purpose at work isn't a single trait you have or lack. It's a portfolio of meaning sources, viewed through one of three orientations, measurable across three facets.

This portfolio view changed my answer to the question I started with. "Do I have a sense of purpose at work?" stops being a yes/no. It becomes "which sources am I actually drawing from, how heavily, and through which orientation?"

The reframing has a practical edge. If I find I'm pulling almost all of my meaning from one source — say, learning — then a job change that removes the learning curve becomes existentially expensive in a way the calendar wouldn't predict. If I find I'm pulling lightly from many sources, I'm more robust to any one of them disappearing.

A few things I'm taking away

• "Purpose at work" isn't one thing — it splits into orientation (job/career/calling), measurable facets (WAMI's PM/MM/GG), and at least eight distinct sources of meaning
• Wrzesniewski's three orientations show up inside every occupation studied — even at West Point, where you'd assume the calling is loaded by the role itself
• Steger's WAMI formalizes "calling" into three measurable parts: personal significance (PM), integration with life meaning (MM), and contribution to others (GG)
• Hansen and Keltner's eight sources sit in four buckets — Purpose, Self-realization, Prestige, Social — and the moves to strengthen each bucket are different
• The skeptic's "it's just personality plus good conditions" objection is partially right, but WAMI predicts unique variance and orientation predicts West Point retention beyond what dispositions alone explain
• More sources isn't strictly better — experiencing one deeply can be enough, but experiencing zero is the signal that matters most
• Purpose at work is closer to a portfolio than a destiny: which sources am I drawing from, how heavily, and through which orientation

The thing that stays with me is that "do I have purpose at work?" is the wrong question. It compresses an eight-by-three-by-three space into a binary, and almost everyone gives the wrong answer because the question is ill-posed.

Joseph Coughlin, drawing on Stanford's Laura Carstensen and her socioemotional selectivity theory, puts the lifespan version cleanly: "even if we don't all manage to squeeze maximal accomplishment out of every ounce of our human potential, we can and do still pursue meaning as we individually define it — through our goals, activities, and relationships." (The Longevity Economy, ch. 8.) The binary framing isn't only imprecise — it imports a peak-or-fail logic from career mythology that the lifespan data has never supported. Most people don't have a single calling moment. They have a portfolio that shifts as the decades shift.

The better question is which two or three sources of meaning your current job is actually feeding — and whether the orientation you're holding it through is doing those sources justice. That's the question the next post tries to act on, because once you can name the gaps, the next move is whether you change the work, change the orientation, or change the structure around both.

Sources

• Keltner, D. — Lecture: "Purpose at Work," Science of Happiness at Work, BerkeleyX. Used for: the working definition of purpose at work and the three personal cultivation moves
• Bunderson, J. S., & Thompson, J. A. — The Call of the Wild: Zookeepers, Callings, and the Double-edged Sword of Deeply Meaningful Work, Administrative Science Quarterly 54(1), 32–57 (2009). Used for: the analytical question that opens the post — calling as binding and ennobling
• BetterUp Labs — Workers Value Meaning at Work, Meaning and Purpose at Work (MAP) report (2018). Used for: the stake — workers willing to trade ~23% of future earnings (~$21,000/year) for meaningful work
• Gallup — State of the Global Workplace: 2024. Used for: the 21% global engagement figure that frames why purpose isn't a luxury concept
• Wrzesniewski, A. — Yale School of Management. Used for: the three orientations (job/career/calling), the West Point cadet longitudinal study, and the broader claim that orientation matters more than role
• Wrzesniewski, A., McCauley, C., Rozin, P., & Schwartz, B. — Jobs, Careers, and Callings: People's Relations to Their Work, Journal of Research in Personality 31(1), 21–33 (1997). Used for: the original three-orientation typology and the administrative-assistants thirds finding
• Steger, M. F., Dik, B. J., & Duffy, R. D. — Measuring Meaningful Work: The Work and Meaning Inventory (WAMI), Journal of Career Assessment 20(3), 322–337 (2012). Used for: the three-facet measurement model (PM/MM/GG) and the unique-variance finding
• Hansen, M., & Keltner, D. — Eight Ways to Find More Meaning at Work, Greater Good Magazine. Used for: the eight-source / four-bucket organization (Purpose, Self-realization, Prestige, Social)
• Grant, A. — Putting a Face to a Name: The Art of Motivating Employees, Knowledge@Wharton (2010); fundraising-callers field study. Used for: the analytical close on the Contributions bullet — five minutes with a scholarship recipient lifted weekly minutes 142% and weekly revenue 171%
• Amabile, T., & Kramer, S. — What Makes Work Worth Doing?, Harvard Business Review (2012). Used for: the rebuttal to Haque's critique — even ordinary work can be infused with purpose if employees experience contributions to others
• Haque, U. — Betterness: Economics for Humans. Used for: the steelman that most work has no broader social mission
• Lawrence, P., & Nohria, N. — Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices. Used for: the "power" source of meaning at work
• Pink, D. — Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Used for: the "autonomy" source of meaning at work
• World Happiness Report (2017). Used for: the comparative claim that people working with a sense of purpose are happier than those working without — and than those not working at all
• Carstensen, L. — Socioemotional selectivity theory, as quoted in Coughlin (2017), ch. 8. Used for: the broadening conclusion — meaning is pursued across the lifespan, not concentrated at a single peak
• Coughlin, J. F. — The Longevity Economy: Unlocking the World's Fastest-Growing, Most Misunderstood Market (Hachette, 2017). Used for: the Carstensen quote that broadens the post's closing frame
• Greater Good Science Center, UC Berkeley. Used for: the editorial framing of the eight-source list and the Keltner lecture series