Vital work: Meaning and experience within the natural workplace

Efforts to reinvent the corporation depict a struggle to establish a new vision of work founded on a more clearly articulated set of humanistic values and constructivist models. Too often, however, strategies result in miseducative experiences. The natural workplace--one which ceases to artificially create, control, and manage the experience of workers--presents a picture of work as vital, embracing the human quest to live life fully with animation, meaningfulness, and purpose. As such, the natural workplace suggests a way of conducting work that is most consistent with human nature and our drive for growth and development. Using phenomenological methods, this study explores the lived experience and meaning-making of people within two organizations attempting to create a more natural, more humanized, work environment. Findings reveal a dynamic, contradictory, and emotional experience of work, and participants structure their experience in terms of self/self-other relationships, connectedness and relatedness, the role of past work experience, individual differences, and personal meaning of work. There is a clear and meaningful interaction between the objective conditions of work and the subjective experience of people within these sites. Self-authority, participatory work practices, and interaction with others were found to provide avenues for growth and development as well as the expression of human spirit. Findings suggest the natural workplace may provide an educative environment, stimulating both adult and organizational development