A sense of meaningfulness is one of the most sought?after work characteristics which has been associated with employees’ well-being. This study explored whether meaningful work enhances self-rated health in challenging work context, under the stressors of distractions, unnecessary tasks, and unreasonable tasks. Data was collected from Finnish teachers (N = 1,658) and structural equation modelling was employed with the latent interaction terms. Results showed that meaningful work was associated with better self-rated health and the stressors were associated with poorer self-rated health. Protective potential of meaningful work against stressors was also discovered, as meaningful work mitigated the harm of stressors on self-rated health. These findings indicate that meaningful work acts as an important resource for employees’ self-rated health and helps them to better cope with stressful work conditions, enhancing well-being. The protective quality of meaningful work means that even challenging work context may have less harm for employees’ well-being, if they have a strong sense of meaning in work. The practical implications of the findings for teachers and organizations are discussed.

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This study investigated the reasons that leaders have given for their leader role occupancy. By using a mixed-method approach and large leader data, we aimed to provide a more nuanced picture of how leader positions are occupied in real life. We examined how individual leadership motivation may associate with other reasons for leader role occupancy. In addition, we aimed to integrate the different reasons behind leader role occupancy into the framework of sustainable leader careers and its two indicators: leader’s health (occupational well-being) and performance (measured indirectly as followers’ occupational well-being). The survey data consisted of 1,031 leaders from various sectors of working life. Qualitative analysis revealed that leaders mention various factors behind their leader role occupancy, resulting 26 themes. After inductive investigation of the data, theory-driven analysis focused on the sustainable career components (person, context, time) and agency vs. non-agency. Qualitative data was quantitized based on the theory-driven categories for statistical analysis. Based on the these analysis, we found out that only Affective-Identity MTL predicted all of the studied reasons behind leader role occupancy, whereas the other motivation types (Non-calculative MTL and Social-Normative MTL) did not. All of the reasons for leader role occupancy except non-agentic ones were related to both leaders’ own and their followers’ occupational well-being. Leaders with more person-related and agentic reasons for leader role occupancy experienced better occupational well-being. Person- and context-related and agentic reasons behind leader role occupancy associated also with followers’ occupational well-being, but the associations differed from those of leaders’ well-being: person-related and agentic reasons associated with followers’ exhaustion, but this association was not found among leaders. Our study provided important information for practitioners in the field of human resources and development, as it has shown that if the reasons for leader role occupancy mainly reflect circumstances or other non-person-related reasons, the experienced occupational well-being and person-career fit may remain weak. It is necessary to try to support the leadership motivation for those leaders, or to shape the job description in such a way that it can also offer the experiences of meaningfulness from aspects other than self-realization through a managerial role.

The growing body of research suggests that leadership is not among the most attractive career goals, especially for the younger work force. However, the need for leadership has not diminished. To shed light on the "problem of supply", this study addresses the question of why high-potential individuals (i.e., non-leaders) do not pursue leadership positions by focusing on worries about leadership (WAL) and errorrelated strain. We had two aims: (1) to identify different profiles of WAL among highly educated professionals, and (2) to explore whether their error strain and leadership career intentions differ among the identified WAL profiles. Data were gathered from 955 highly educated Finnish employees representing different sectors. WAL was measured by a three-dimensional scale consisting of worries about failure, work-life imbalance, and harming others. Based on the Latent Profile Analysis, six WAL profiles emerged: (1) Average-WAL (37% of respondents), (2) Low-WAL (34%), (3) High-WAL (6%), (4) Failure-sensitive (9%), (5) Imbalance-sensitive (4%) and ( 6) Harm-sensitive (11%). Professionals in the Low-WAL profile reported the lowest error strain, whereas employees in the profiles of High-WAL and Failure-sensitive reported the highest error strain. Employees in the Low-WAL profile were more willing to pursue a leadership career in an unfamiliar organization compared to employees in other profiles. In addition, employees within the Low-WAL profile were more willing to pursue a leadership career in an unfamiliar organization compared to their home organization. Implications of our findings and future directions are discussed.