This symposium opens up the idea of sustainable jobs in organizations. It considers the means through which employees act upon their jobs and careers in ways that allow them to experience their work as more motivating, meaningful, or sustainable over time. The papers conceptually and empirically extend the idea of sustainable work by illustrating why particular practices create potential for experiencing work in a different way. The first paper addresses how jobs are made more sustainable through collaborative efforts to change the task, relational, and cognitive boundaries of the work. It considers the practices that create high performance and a sense of satisfaction and commitment among employees. The second paper picks up the thread of collaborative process in the creation of sustainable work by considering how employees working in difficult contexts use humor and play to sustain meaningfulness in work. The third paper looks at the special case of employees working in low-status jobs to explore how they direct their efforts to make these jobs more sustainable. When constrained from making changes to the work, employees persist in their efforts to create a sense of autonomy and power in order to cope. The fourth paper continues to explore the theme of one's position by exploring the role of one's job rank in shaping job crafting. It considers how employees adapt their proactive efforts to reshape their jobs in different ways according to their place in the organizational hierarchy. The fifth paper details how individuals' imagined future work selves represent an identity-based resource that can help create sustainable careers. Individuals with more elaborated future work selves enjoy benefits ranging from better performance to higher proactivity. The sixth paper takes a theoretical approach to exploring the difference between healthy, sustainable callings, which are marked by a sense of identity investment and flexibility and unhealthy callings, in which one's identity investment is extreme and inflexible. Healthy callings are judged to be more sustainable because they rest on more flexible identity structures. Taken together, these papers examine a range of organizational settings, including health care, charity work, education, journalism, advocacy work, and manufacturing, to draw helpful conclusions about the various ways in which employees may create more sustainable work.

Agenda/Outline

Work Process and Quality of Care in Early Childhood Education: The Role of Job Crafting
Presenter: Carrie R. Leana; U. of Pittsburgh;
Presenter: Eileen Appelbaum; Rutgers U.;
Presenter: Iryna Shevchuk; U. of Pittsburgh;

Lighthearted Fun in Heartbreaking Work: Sustaining Meaningfulness through Playfulness
Presenter: Adam M. Grant; U. of Pennsylvania;
Presenter: Justin Berg; U. of Pennsylvania;

Fashioning Provisional Jobs: How Workers Stuck In Low-Status Jobs Cope
Presenter: Sandra Spataro; Cornell U.;
Presenter: Lisa Ellen Cohen; London Business School;

Overcoming Barriers in the Crafting of Sustainable Jobs
Presenter: Justin Berg; U. of Pennsylvania;
Presenter: Amy Wrzesniewski; Yale U.;
Presenter: Jane E. Dutton; U. of Michigan;

Motivating Proactive Behavior to Achieve a Sustainable Career: The Power of the Future Work Self
Presenter: Karoline Strauss; U. of Sheffield;
Presenter: Mark A. Griffin; U. of Sheffield;

Sustaining a Calling Over Time
Presenter: Teresa Cardador; U. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign;
Presenter: Brianna Barker Caza; U. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign;