Amy Wrzesniewski

Introduction

Amy Wrzesniewski is an organizational psychologist who changed how researchers think about the boundary between a person and a job. Her 1997 typology of work orientations — job, career and calling — established that the meaning people find in work is not a property of the occupation: hospital cleaners and administrative assistants can describe their work as a vocation while physicians describe theirs as a paycheck. Her 2001 theory of job crafting, developed with Jane Dutton, made the further claim that employees are not passive holders of roles but active shapers of them, altering tasks, relationships and the cognitive framing of what the work is for.

She is the William and Jacalyn Egan Professor of Management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Her more recent work has moved toward contexts where meaning is hard to sustain — stigmatized occupations, gig work, algorithmic management, unemployment — and toward the finding that meaning is not an unqualified good.

Early Life and Education

Wrzesniewski earned a B.A. in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1994, graduating magna cum laude with honours in psychology. She then completed an M.A. in 1996 and a Ph.D. in 1999 in organizational psychology at the University of Michigan, where she was a graduate student instructor in the psychology department and, in her final year, an adjunct lecturer at the business school.

Michigan in the mid-1990s was the centre of the emerging positive organizational scholarship movement, and her dissertation work was shaped by two of its concerns: how people construct meaning, and how they do so under conditions that offer little of it. Her first major paper, published in 1997 with Clark McCauley, Paul Rozin and Barry Schwartz, introduced the job-career-calling distinction that has structured the field since.

Academic and Professional Career

Wrzesniewski began her academic career at New York University's Leonard N. Stern School of Business as an assistant professor, where she stayed from 1999 to 2006 and won the school's teaching awards. She joined the Yale School of Management in 2006 as an associate professor of management, became a full professor in 2015, and was named the Michael H. Jordan Professor of Management in 2018. She spent 2012–13 as a visiting professor at Wharton and moved there permanently in 2019, where she holds the William and Jacalyn Egan Professorship of Management.

She co-edited the volume Identity and the Modern Organization, serves or has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Organizational Behavior and Organization Science, and convenes the "Meaning Microcommunity," the network of meaning-in-work scholars that has met annually since 2004. Her research has been supported by IBM, Google, Sun Microsystems, the United States Military Academy at West Point, the University of Michigan Hospital System and the Kauffman Foundation.

Her honours include an IBM Faculty Award for research excellence, the Best Paper Award from the Davis Conference on Qualitative Research, the Outstanding Author Award from the Emerald Publishing Literati Network on two occasions, Yale SOM's Alumni Association Teaching Award for the best professor in the MBA core, the Herbert Simon Award, a Wharton Teaching Excellence Award and the Administrative Science Quarterly Scholarly Contribution Award.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Work orientations: job, career and calling

Wrzesniewski and her colleagues proposed that people relate to their work in one of three ways. Those with a job orientation work for material reward and direct their energies elsewhere. Those with a career orientation work for advancement, status and the satisfactions of achievement. Those with a calling orientation work for the inherent fulfilment of the activity and see it as inseparable from who they are.

The striking result was that orientation was nearly independent of occupation. Within every occupational group studied, from technicians to administrators to cleaners, all three orientations appeared. The strongest predictor of satisfaction was not how prestigious or well-paid the work was but which orientation the person brought to it — and, crucially, calling-oriented people were not concentrated in the professions. The finding supplied the empirical basis for the claim that meaning is made rather than found in a job description.

Job crafting

In 2001 Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton argued that job design research had treated employees as recipients of roles rather than as authors of them. They identified three forms of crafting. Task crafting changes the number, scope or kind of tasks performed. Relational crafting changes with whom one interacts and how. Cognitive crafting changes how the work is framed: the same set of tasks, seen as "cleaning patient rooms" rather than "removing the conditions in which infection spreads," is a different job. Subsequent work showed that crafting changes the work identity of the person doing it, not merely their attitude, and that the same change can be enabling or hindered depending on rank and organisational context.

Meaning in difficult contexts

Much of Wrzesniewski's later programme examines meaning where it is most fragile. Her work on stigmatized and "dirty" occupations, on being valued and devalued at work, and on virtual and absent work treats meaning as something that must be continually re-established rather than secured once. Her 2019 paper on the gig economy, with Gianpiero Petriglieri and Susan Ashford, analysed how workers without organisational membership construct and defend precarious, personalised work identities, and what "holding environments" make that possible. More recent work with Wenqi Jiang introduces the construct of meaning fixedness — the extent to which a person believes the meaning of their occupation is fixed — and shows that it predicts how well people navigate occupational destabilisation.

When more motivation is not better

A 2014 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, drawing on longitudinal data from more than 10,000 West Point cadets, produced a result that complicates the meaning literature from the inside. Cadets who held both strong intrinsic motives and strong instrumental motives — career, status, obligation — performed worse over time on persistence, performance and commitment than cadets who held strong intrinsic motives alone. Adding motives did not multiply motivation; it divided it. The finding is notable because its chief author is one of the field's leading students of work meaning, and it cuts against the assumption that layering more reasons onto work makes people better off.

Major Publications

  • Wrzesniewski, A., McCauley, C., Rozin, P., & Schwartz, B. (1997). Jobs, careers, and callings: People's relations to their work. Journal of Research in Personality, 31, 21–33.
  • Wrzesniewski, A., & Dutton, J. E. (2001). Crafting a job: Revisioning employees as active crafters of their work. Academy of Management Review, 26, 179–201.
  • Berg, J. M., Dutton, J. E., & Wrzesniewski, A. (2013). Job crafting and meaningful work. In B. J. Dik, Z. S. Byrne, & M. F. Steger (Eds.), Purpose and Meaning in the Workplace (pp. 81–104). American Psychological Association.
  • Wrzesniewski, A., Schwartz, B., Cong, X., Kane, M., Omar, A., & Kolditz, T. (2014). Multiple types of motives don't multiply the motivation of West Point cadets. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111, 10990–10995.
  • Petriglieri, G., Ashford, S. J., & Wrzesniewski, A. (2019). Agony and ecstasy in the gig economy: Cultivating holding environments for precarious and personalized work identities. Administrative Science Quarterly, 64, 124–170.
  • Jiang, W., & Wrzesniewski, A. (2023). Perceiving fixed or flexible meaning: Toward a model of meaning fixedness and navigating occupational destabilization. Administrative Science Quarterly.

Impact and Legacy

Job crafting is now a standard construct in organisational behaviour, human resource practice and career counselling, and the vocabulary of calling has entered how workers, managers and coaches talk about careers. Wrzesniewski's work is part of the broader turn toward meaning and purpose in the study of work, and it connects that literature to positive psychology and to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's account of flow in everyday activity.

The research has also generated a substantial critical literature, and Wrzesniewski and her co-authors have acknowledged the central parts of it themselves — the 2013 handbook chapter she wrote with Justin Berg and Jane Dutton explicitly notes that meaningful work carries negative side effects.

The double-edged sword of calling. The most consequential critique is Bunderson and Thompson's 2009 study of zookeepers. Calling-oriented workers tolerated lower pay, longer hours and worse conditions because the meaning of the work compensated them; their commitment was partly independent of compensation, which meant employers could extract more for less. Meaningful work, in their formulation, becomes a vector for exploitation when structural protections are weak. Related work by Berg, Grant and Johnson found that people who hold a calling they cannot pursue are worse off than people who hold none — living an unanswered calling predicted lower satisfaction and commitment, not higher.

Crafting requires room to craft. The job crafting model presumes discretion. In tightly scripted work — call centres, warehouses, platform work under algorithmic management — the scope to change tasks or relationships is narrow to nonexistent, and the remedy that remains is cognitive crafting, which critics note is close to reframing one's own exploitation. The individual-agency framing can also relocate responsibility: if employees are authors of their jobs, then bad jobs become a failure of crafting rather than a failure of design.

Construct overlap. Job crafting substantially overlaps with earlier ideas — role innovation, personal initiative, proactive behaviour, task revision, job enrichment and idiosyncratic deals — and the empirical literature has been slow to establish what it adds beyond them. Early evidence was predominantly cross-sectional and self-reported, so direction of causation between crafting and meaning is often ambiguous; later longitudinal and intervention work has improved on this without fully resolving it.

Class and selection in the orientation typology. The finding that calling orientation is distributed across occupations is one of the most quoted results in the field, and one of the most contested. Because the original evidence is cross-sectional, it cannot distinguish a chosen orientation from a rationalisation of material circumstances, and it says little about who can afford to treat work as a calling. If the same person can be calling-oriented in a secure, well-paid role and job-oriented in a precarious one, orientation may be as much a consequence of conditions as a cause of satisfaction.

Effects are modest and conditional. Intervention studies generally find that crafting can be taught, but the effects on performance and well-being are moderate at best, depend heavily on supervisor support and peer response, and can generate role conflict and coordination costs when individual crafting diverges from what the team needs. Wrzesniewski's own later work on meaning fixedness and on gig-economy holding environments reads in part as a response to this: meaning is treated as something that must be sustained by conditions, not only by individual initiative.

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Last updated: 2026-10-20

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