Published on: October 16, 2025 at 9:57 am
A lesson for organizations’ leaders and employees alike: You don’t have to do that much to make a significant impact on the lives of others and find meaning in your work. Sometimes making an effort to the best of your ability is sufficient.
Academy of Management Scholar Jaqueline “Jackie” Coyle-Shapiro of California State University, San Bernardino, and the London School of Economics (LSE)—who cowrote an Academy of Management Journal article on this topic with Harry Barkema and Eva le Grand, both of LSE—noted that many schoolteachers who live and work in slums and aren’t highly educated have a strong desire to make a difference in the lives of their students.
“These teachers were spending some extra time with students they because they lived in the slums and knew what the challenges these kids faced. Through that knowledge, they were able to have make a difference in the lives of those students, Coyle-Shapiro said. “The surprising thing about that piece of research is these teachers were able to kind of tweak their job a little and do things that were extra, not defined in the role.
“This made a huge difference in terms of the slum school kids whose futures weren’t particularly bright,” she said. “Through that interaction, you know, the teachers were able to impart an ambition and an aspiration for these kids that they were commenting, ‘I want to be a doctor’ or ‘I want to be a teacher,’ and yet, at the same time, the teacher wasn’t doing something incredibly different.
“The lasting impact that it’s had on me is that making a difference in the lives of others doesn’t involve millions of pounds, but at an individual level, it just involves doing something a little differently, a little more empathetically, a little more thoughtfully.”
Lessons learned
Coyle-Shapiro’s advice for bosses is to give employees more autonomy so that they can craft their jobs in ways that have greater impact. Workers should seek out positions that facilitate them creating more meaningfulness in their work.
“Particularly for frontline workers that are dealing with clients or beneficiaries outside the organization, leaders and managers shouldn’t shackle them with rules and procedures to a great extent,” Coyle-Shapiro said.
“Instead, decision-makers should allow employees to have some autonomy in terms of what they do for the clients and the beneficiaries outside the organization,” she said.
“That’s primarily because employees need to have a little bit of autonomy, and that allows them to craft a role that will give them greater purpose and meaningfulness, and as a result of that, have a greater positive impact on their beneficiaries.”
