Task Significance: Meaning and Examples

In the context of organizational behavior and organizational psychology, task significance is the degree to which a particular job affects the lives of others. As it relates to Greg Oldham and J. Richard Hackman’s job characteristics model, a person’s task significance can predict both job satisfaction and job performance. If a person associates their work with meaningfulness and positive impacts, it can spur a sense of purpose and work motivation.

Academics have focused on the relationship between task significance and worker well-being. Publications include A.M. Grant’s “The significance of task significance: Job performance effects, relational mechanisms, and boundary conditions” in the Journal of Applied Psychology (2008); Ralph Katz’s “Job longevity as a situational factor in job satisfaction” in Administrative Science Quarterly (1978); Y. Fried and G.R. Ferris’s “The validity of the job characteristics model: A review and meta-analysis” in Personnel Psychology (1987); and R.W. Renn and R.J. Vandenberg’s “The critical psychological states: An underrepresented component in job characteristics model research” in the Journal of Management (1995).

There are two main types of task significance: One promotes tangible outcomes within an organization, and the other promotes tangible outcomes outside the organization.

• External task significance: An example of external task significance is the output of a social worker. Their work helps clients build a sense of self-efficacy, self-reliance, and mental well-being. They can see their work’s effects on their patients’ improved lives.
• Internal task significance: An example of internal task significance is the output of a payroll operations manager. While their efforts in employee payroll do not directly manifest outside the organization, they impact the work environment. Because the payroll officer handles the critical task of allocating money to workers, those employees can do their jobs and help the company contribute to society at large.

Improving a person’s sense of task significance requires work from multiple stakeholders in an organization.

• Founders and leaders: Startup entrepreneurs and C-suite executives can set a company-wide sense of task significance through their mission statement and core business initiatives. If employees see how the entire company is making a difference in people’s lives, they may be better able to envision how their own role contributes to the results. When company morale drifts, founders and leaders may need to stage interventions that realign all stakeholders toward collective, purposeful goals. Such transformational leadership can promote task significance on an individual and organizational basis.
• Human resources: Human resource officers who spend a lot of time studying social psychology and citizenship behavior understand that a sense of purpose is a key pillar of job enrichment. HR may need to steer employees who feel adrift and unimportant within the broader organization. They may also need to mediate between workers and their managers, helping to design roles that combine organizational success, employee empowerment, and a motivating sense of task significance.
• Individual employees: Individual employees must play a role in their own sense of task significance. It helps when they already enjoy a sense of task identity—a condition where they can see the fruits of their labor manifest in a finished product. The employees must also think broadly about the kind of impact their work is making. Perhaps their efforts do not resonate much beyond the four walls of their office building, but by making a positive contribution to their work environment, they are helping their organization in its broader mission.
• Project managers: Project managers, department heads, and team leaders must consider task significance as part of a job design rubric. They should create jobs under the assumption that people want to feel their work is valuable to their coworkers and to the world. For many workers, contributing to meaningful change may be as much of a job incentive as money or status. Whether you aim to design a new role or redesign an existing one, envision a future employee who values the meaning of work and gains a sense of worth from their task significance.

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