What makes a meaningful day? Navigating reciprocity and variability in crafting meaningfulness deals

Despite the increased emphasis on meaningful work and the expectation that it should form a crucial part of the "new deal" in employee-employer relationships, pursuing and sustaining meaningful work amidst its inherent daily fluctuations remains elusive and challenging, even in seemingly meaningful jobs. Emerging evidence points to meaningfulness's dynamic and potentially transient nature, yet we still lack a nuanced, holistic account of the ebb and flow of meaningfulness that explains what makes and sustains a meaningful day. Grounded in psychological contract theory and work orientations, we propose the "meaningfulness deal," a dynamic framework that views meaningful work as the core currency that shapes the reciprocal exchange of contributions between employees and employers. We utilize a two-phase design, including a 10-day experience sampling and a two-wave longitudinal study, to test hypotheses at the within- and between-person levels. We find that daily fulfillment of individualized paths to meaningfulness increases meaningfulness, resulting in employees feeling compelled to reciprocate with helping behaviors. Following a cyclical dynamic, we also find that reciprocation on one day leads to a positive spillover effect as employers provide further opportunities for pursuing meaningfulness the following day. We find an inverted U relationship between the number of paths pursued and global but not daily meaningfulness, challenging the assumption that more meaningfulness is always better. Finally, our results reveal how the daily pursuit of meaningful work aggregates to what we call "meaningfulness variability, "which links daily experiences with broad, long-term outcomes such as decreased global meaningfulness and performance.