Do the Meaning of Work and the Coherence between a Person and His Work Environment Express the Same Reality?

Abstract

The international literature review on the meaning of work reveals that, there is still an epistemological confusion between the meaning and coherence constructs. To date, no research has empirically proven that the meaning of work, which emerges from the perception of the work (Gomez-Gonzalez et al., 2013), its purpose (Proulx et al., 2013) and its contribution to the meaning of existence (Hackman & Oldman, 1976, Rosso et al., 2010 and Steger et al., 2012), has an autonomous and a distinctive character not only with respect to the perceived and effective coherence existing between the worker and the working environment, but also vis-à-vis other factors which view the meaning as a subset of more important constructs like psychological empowerment. To address this gap, this research aims at continuing the empirical validation on the inventory of the meaning of work (Arnoux-Nicolas et al., 2016) while examining not only its factorial structure, but also and especially the conceptual and empirical differences between the meaning and coherence. Confirmatory factor analyses were carried out on 623 hospital staffs in Cameroon, showing that the two-dimensional structure of the meaning inventory presents better statistical indices of adequacy on the real data and accounts for 71.486% of the explained variance. Correlational analyses that were carried out on 359 samples validated the distinctive and autonomous character of meaning with respect to coherence (r ≈ ?32).