What does work meaning to hospitality employees? The effects of meaningful work on employees’ organizational commitment: The mediating role of job engagement

What is work? Why is it important? People frequently say that they work to make a living, but many who have enough money on which to live feel unhappy when they have no work to do. Humans can find personal significance through work, and in this respect, work can be said to be the foundation and center of human life. Motivated by these questions, this study was aimed at considering the meaning of work held by hospitality employees and its multiple dimensions in order to determine which dimension employees feel makes their work's meaning and encourages them to be engaged in their jobs and to commit to the organization. Data were collected from a questionnaire distributed to employees of family-style restaurants and 5-star hotels in South Korea. A total of 352 hospitality employees participated. The empirical results indicate that employees’ meaning of work positively influences their job engagement and organizational commitment. In more detail, work centrality, interpersonal relations, economic orientation, and obligation norms significantly affect employees’ job engagement whereas entitlement norms and expressive orientation did not. Also, work centrality, obligation norms, economic orientation, interpersonal relations, and expressive orientation—among meaning of work—significantly influence employees’ commitment. Additionally, employees’ engagement positively affects organizational commitment.